Window on Eurasia: Regionalists in Russia Must Back Kyiv against the Kremlin, Site Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 6 – Vladimir Putin has adopted the rhetoric of national self-determination and federalism in Ukraine, but a leading Russian regionalist site says that this is “hypocrisy and a farce” which should deceive no one and especially not regionalists and federalists in Russia because it is only “a cover for an aggressive imperial policy.”

            “Today,” Ingria.info says, “the Ukrainian army is fighting not only for the freedom if its own Motherland but also for the freedom of all Russian lands.”  Those opposing Kyiv “are not regionalists or freedom fighter but rather Chechen militants, mercenaries and backers of the rebirth of the totalitarian Soviet empire” (ingria.info/articles/934-2014-06-04-23-01-49).

            The regionalist site, which unites regionalists and federalists in St. Petersburg and the northwestern portion of the Russian Federation, says that “the victory of anti-imperial, anti-Moscow forces in Ukraine will deprive the Kremlin regime of a significant portion of its resources, be an example for Russians ... and speed up [their] liberation.”

            Consequently, those who “want to live in a European community of free peoples and not in a Eurasian empire under the patronage of China” must not fall for “Kremlin propaganda” and conclude that opposing Ukraine is a form of “’patriotism.’”  Moscow is not only cutting Russia off from Europe but handing control over Russian territories to China.

            The regionalist site suggests that Russians should answer the following question “honestly: Do you want to live in North Korea?  I yes, then go, everything is ready for you: ration cards, concentration camps and the deification of ‘wise leaders.’” If not, then Russians must answer with “a firm ‘no’” and “not participate” in Russia’s crimes against Ukraine “by their approval.”

            This declaration reflects the fact that some Russians have in fact been deceived by the Kremlin and believe that Vladimir Putin’s support for decentralization and federalism in Ukraine will help them in their promotion of similar values within the Russian Federation, a trend Ingria.info noted a few days ago (ingria.info/articles/932-2014-06-03-11-15-42).

            There is no reason for anyone to believe that, the portal says. Moscow seized Crimea and is backing the secessionists in Donetsk and Luhansk not because it supports these values but rather for economic gains, including access to oil and gas reserves on the Black Sea floor in the former and political ones such as weakening Ukrainian democracy and Western ties in the latter.

            “The self-proclaimed republics of the south east of Ukraine are not a manifestation of local regionalism and self-consciousness,” Ingria.info says. They are “from beginning to enda Moscow project,” controlled by Russian citizens Moscow has sent in and covered Potemkin Village-style by powerless local people in public positions.

            There is no “regionalist self-consciousness” involved, and any “consciousness” that does exist there is “Soviet and has as its final goal not regionalism but the restoration of the USSR.”  Moscow doesn’t need or care about the people there. It only wants to use them in order to expand its power by excluding Western influence. 

            Consequently, those who believe in regionalism, federalism and freedom, the portal says, must recognize that “’the separatists’ of South Osetia, Abkhazia, the Donetsk Peoples Republic and the Luhansk Peoples Republic are not allies of regionalism but its most evil enemies,” people who are providing backing or “the imperial ambitions of the Kremlin regime.”

Window on Eurasia: A Second Ukraine Being Reborn in Russian Far East

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 6 – Moscow officials say that an increasing number of Ukrainians are seeking refuge from the turmoil in their country by moving to the Russian Federation, and experts note that unexpectedly for the central Russian government, many of them are seeking to settle in the Russian Far East.

            But as Ulyana Ivanova points out on Nazaccent.ru, no one should be surprised by this because “a century ago, Ukrainians formed two-thirds of the population” of the Russian Far East. They remain the second largest nationality there, and there are few of any nationality, including Russian, who do not have Ukrainian roots (nazaccent.ru/content/11938-zelenyj-klin.html).

            And while it may be too soon to speak of the rebirth of the “Zelenyi kiln” or “Green Wedge,” as Ukrainians have called this region, because the flow of Ukrainians from Ukraine proper is still small, it is clearly the case that their arrival is sparking renewed interest in what was once “the second Ukraine.”

            The origins of Zelnyi klin go back to 1883 when the tsarist government organized the first move of Ukrainian peasants from Chernihov and Kyiv guberniyas to Vladivostok. They were followed by tens of thousands of others from elsewhere in Ukraine, and by 1914, “there were more Ukrainians in that region than Russians.”

            The villages they built in the region resembled Ukrainian farms and had Ukrainian names, and at the time of the Russian revolution, “the leaders of the Ukrainian division in Zelenyi kiln adopted a resolution calling for the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state on the Pacific and began to form an army,” Ivanova writes.

            Ukrainian military units were formed in “practically all major cities” there, and residents flocked to obtain Ukrainian passports. There were Ukrainian schools and Ukrainian newspapers.  But when the Bolsheviks seized the area in the fall of 1922, they “liquidated all the Ukrainian organizations and arrested the leaders.”

            Today in the Far East live the second, third, and fourth generation of descendants of these Ukrainians, and “in Primorsky kray it is difficult to find an indigenous resident who does not have Ukrainian ancestors,” even though most of them, as a result of Soviet policy, now identify themselves as ethnic Russians.

            But despite that, “Ukrainian culture in the Far East is on the rise and actively developing itself,” Ivanova says.

            One of the activists in this is Mariya Zbarych, a Ukrainian who came there after the Chernobyl accident contaminated where she and her family had lived in Ukraine.  Using her own resources, she has recreated a Ukrainian farm in Primorsky kray to show Ukrainians and those with Ukrainian roots what their land was like before the Bolsheviks.

                Ivanova also spoke with Vyacheslav Chernomaz, who teaches at Vladivostok’s Far Eastern Law Institute of the MVD and who has become one of the leading historians of the Zelenyi kiln past and present. (For his biography and a list of some of his articles in Ukrainian as well as Russian, see ukrainistika.ru/issledovateli/chernomaz-vyacheslav-anatolevich/).

            Chernomaz, an ethnic Ukrainian who was born and grew up in the Far East – his grandfather came to the region 70 years ago-- says that when he visited Ukraine for the first time in the early 1990s, he felt entirely at home but when he was in central Russia, he “felt that he had landed in a different country. 

            He says that when he was growing up in the 1970s, “our Primorsky population was already not Ukrainian speaking but it was still Ukrainian singing.” And he pointed to the large number of restaurants and cafes there that feature “traditional Ukrainian foods” rather than more generic Russian or Soviet ones.

            As Ivanova observes, “the national-cultural life of Ukrainians of the Far East is extremely diverse. They hold music festivals and Ukrainian poetry competitions, and they publish books and newspaper.” But most of them – and there are nearly 100, she says – operate as amateur artistic collectives rather than being state-supported ones.

            One should have no doubt, the Nazaccent.ru writer concludes, “that those who resettle from Ukraine will be completely comfortable in all regards in their new motherland on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.”

Window on Eurasia: Moscow TV has Shaped but Not Created Russian Response to Crimea, Levada Center Expert Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 6 – Many have blamed Moscow’s state-controlled television for whipping up anti-Ukrainian attitudes among Russians, but Aleksey Levinson, a Levada Center sociologist, argues that what the broadcasts have done is not to create something out of whole cloth but rather to shape and exacerbate it.

            In an interview with Andrey Lipsky of “Novaya gazeta,” Levinson suggests that much deeper forces are at work and that the response of Russians to Ukraine reflects “an echo” of the problems they faced at the end of the Soviet period and in the years since that time (novayagazeta.ru/politics/63879.html).

            “Of course,” he acknowledges, “much would be different” if Russians had access to a television channel that presented an alternative vision to that on offer on state television. “But we have what we have” and that is a massconsciousness which reflects “the mental and moral pit” into which Russians have fallen and out of which “it will be very difficult to escape.”

            In recent months, Levinson says, Russians at all levels have”allowed themselves to think and actin ways that they would earlier have considered impossible, indecent and impermissible.” The body politic is suffering from a high fever, and to recover, it will need the appearance of someone like Academician Sakharov to speak honestly about what is going on.

            When asked about Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, the sociologist continues, Russians respond that Russia in this case is acting “’like a great power.’”  Only secondarily do they say that Crimea had always been Russian in the past, that Khrushchev “made a mistake,” or that it is part of their world because they had travelled there.

            Two years ago, few if any talked about these things, but the events of the last months in Ukraine presented not only a challenge to how Russians see themselves but an opportunity for Moscow to act as it has, and those two factors are inter-related and to a large extent mutually reinforcing.

            That explains Putin’s rating which, Levinson says is not so much “an attribute of Putin but a characteristic of society.” It isn’t a measure of his temperature but of society’s. Of course, Russians are reacting to what he has done, but they are doing so because they are reacting to a much deeper condition in their own lives.

            Levinson suggests that the events in Georgia and Ukraine are very similar in this sense: In each case, Russians viewed someone else who had been “’ours’ or formerly ‘ours’” as having betrayed Russia by turning to the West, and they concluded that these countries must be “punished” for what they had done.

            In short, Russians convinced themselves that what Moscow is doing is a form of justice, not perhaps in the legal court sense but in the deeper moral and political ones. With a different leadership, they might have gone in a different direction, but Russians wanted justice in both cases.

            According to Levinson, what is going on reflects “the consequences of long ago events,” events that are hurting the current generation but for which its members are not directly responsible.  In this, he says, the political situation is “a close analogy to what is happening in demography.”

            Russia is in “a democratic pit,” but it is in one not because of those who are giving or not giving birth now but because of what their parents or even grandparents did.  Correcting something like that is far more difficult because changing the behavior of the current generation doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.

            Politically, the Levada Center expert says, Russians now are caught in “an echo of the events of 1985-1993,” when Russians saw the collapse of one system and the failure of another to deliver what they expected.  That “double failure” has led to widespread distrust among the population.

            To be sure, a few communists believe the Soviet system could work again, and the few democrats believe that democracy could work in Russia.  But among the vast majority, there is no faith in either.  There is “a dark shadow” as on an x-ray plate: “What it is is unclear, but it is always very bad.”

            There are many unanswered questions all centered around why did this happen and why was what was promised not delivered, Levinson says.  And “then appeared the idea of Russia’s special path,” an idea that involves isolationism, xenophobia, and antagonism to the rest of the world.

            Levinson notes that when he asks members of focus groups to draw Russia, “they do not draw a small Russia surrounded by a large antagonist world.” Instead, “they draw an enormous Russia but around it is a petty antagonistic periphery ... a cordon.” And the more antagonistic it is, the greater Russians feel themselves to be.

            When the Georgian war took place in August 2008, Levinson says, many Russians believed that “at last the third world war had begun and we will win it” because winning was not about what we would conquer. Instead, “the main thing was that we showed THEM,” “them” being everyone else.

            Such attitudes sent Putin’s ratings through the roof then, and they are doing the same thing now. Russians once again feel that “the main thing” is that “we showed THEM!”

            But in the Ukrainian case, such attitudes are exacerbated by something else that most Russians are unwilling to face, Levinson says.  Russians look at what the Ukrainians have been able to do first in 2004 and again now, how they have challenged authoritarian rulers and overturned dishonest elections.  And they are asking why can’t Russians do the same?

            The anti-Ukrainian attitudes many Russians have now reflect an envy Russians cannot directly acknowledge. “Of course, there are those who believe that there are Nazis, fascists and Banderites” in Ukraine. “But those who do not believe this see that the Ukrainians have done what we have not.”  And the bitterness of that reflection explains a great deal.

Window on Eurasia: Kremlin’s Policies Cutting Size of Russian World Not Expanding It, Latynina Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 6 – Despite its claims to the contrary, the Kremlin is rapidly reducing the size of the “Russian world” rather than increasing it because it is alienating its neighbors by the use of force rather than attracting them by the strength of its economy and of its universities, according to Yuliya Latynina.

            In short, the “Novaya gazeta” commentator says, Moscow has misunderstood the nature of international politics at the present time – its leaders constantly say they are doing nothing the West hasn’t done – and the possibilities it would have if it were to adopt a different approach abroad and at home (novayagazeta.ru/columns/63911.html).

            The Kremlin has failed to see that there are certain important “differences” between how other countries conduct their geopolitical activity and how Russia does, she continues.  On the one hand, she points out, Western countries “support in foreign lands exactly the same values which they have at home.”

            It is legitimate to how realistic that approach is, she continues, but “one cannot say, for example, that the West supports democracy in the third word while seeking to root it out at home” or that it “demands the observation of human rights somewhere in Somalia but at home does not observe them.” 

            Russia’s approach is different: it “supports in Ukraine what is forbidden in Russia itself.” Moscow “recognizes ‘peoples mayors’ and ‘peoples governors’ abroad, but in Russia itself, Putin has just finally eliminated mayoral elections.” It annexes Crimea with a revolution but doesn’t allow resolutions in Russia. And itcalls for the dismemberment of Ukraine, but it has just made any call for a violation of the territorial integrity of Russia “a criminal offense.”

           

            One can easily imagine how the Kremlin would react if Navalny’s supporters took arms and seized a city administration, Latynina writes, but in Ukraine, the Kremlin supports exactly that and demands that Kyiv simply accept the results of such actions.

            Another problem with the Kremlin’s approach “completely grows out of the first,” she says. When the US gets involved abroad, it does so with the goal of “solving a problem.” Sometimes it can and sometimes not, but that is its goal. It is not in Iraq or Afghanistan to “create bloody chaos.”

            Russia’s policy is just the opposite. It seeks to create chaos, and that by its nature alienates those Moscow should be seeking to attract. “After the Russian-Georgian war, Russia lost Georgia, a country which had been part of the Russian world ... Now, Russia is losing Ukraine.

            “Putin isn’t increasing the size of the Russian world,” Latynina says. “He is reducing it.”

            In the past, military conquest might have been enough to expand influence, but the only means of doing so now, she suggests “is the development of economics and culture.”  One cannot be a “strong geopolitical player without being a strong economy.” China has understood that, but Russia under Putin has not.

            Moreover, Russia could have become not only the economic center of a Russian world but also “an intellectual, educational, and innovation” one as well. Students from Ukraine and Georgia would have wanted to study in Russia, people from neighboring countries would have wanted to go to Russian hospitals, and entrepreneurs would have flocked there.

            Had Russia adopted that course instead of the one it has, Latynina argues, “there would not have been any need to convert the Russian speaking population of the former republics into something like an angry Hamas organization which hates the countries in which they live” and which makes those around them hate their community and Russia itself.

            Pursuing policies like the ones Russia has chosen not do would constitute genuine geopolitics, the commentator concludes. What is going on is something else.  “It is simply geo-psychiatry.”