Can we talk intelligently about Russia and Ukraine? [View all]

[JackRiddler]

Last edited Sun Jul 20, 2014, 05:23 PM - Edit history (1)

I first became aware of the former KGB and FSB commander Vladimir Putin in the summer of 1999, when he was appointed as prime minister under then Russian president Boris Yeltsin. Soon after, apartment buildings in Moscow were subjected to a series of bombings that killed hundreds of people in their homes. The evidence available open source at the time and since suggested strongly that this was, itself, the result of an FSB operation designed to terrorize Muscovites and blame Chechen terrorists; with the immediate aim of justifying a revival of the deadly war that Yeltsin had earlier mounted in Chechnya (1995), but had been forced to withdraw due to a popular opposition led by mothers of soldiers. State-led propaganda styled Putin overnight into the-country’s new strongman and savior. Yeltsin resigned prematurely on December 31st, during the global Millennium celebrations. This left the until then relative unknown Putin as interim president and made him a fait accompli to win presidential elections that were moved up by several months. Russian politics at work, and not just Russian: first we’ll have the election, then you all can vote.

Curious that this original crime of the Putin tenure is not mentioned today by those outside Russia who have styled him into a new Hitler and greatest threat to world peace, but I guess giving credence to accusations of false-flag operations anywhere is a sensitive matter. We prefer our politics to appear as the result of things we can see. It’s personally appalling to me that, having followed his essentially criminal rise and autocratic rule for the last 15 years, I am now accused of being a “Putin lover” and fascist sympathizer and the like, simply for not participating in the “New Hitler” narrative that should be the exclusive province of neo-cons, and not a common theme at DU. This recalls for me the situation in 2002-2003, when Saddam Hussein was demonized as the new Hitler and intolerable threat to the world. But at the time, about 2/3 of DU members adamantly opposed the narrative and the Bush regime’s drive toward a U.S. military invasion of Iraq. We did not fall for the false dichotomy. We were able to say that yes, Saddam was very bad, but not that it therefore followed that Bush and his war were good, or in any way acceptable, or anything less than an unprovoked act of aggressive war. Yet there were also those even on DU who took the bait, and suggested that the anti-war majority here was in fact “supporting Saddam.”

This is a plea for the kind of intelligence, nuance, and determination to get at complicated truths, which was in the majority on DU at the time, to be applied now to the present situations in Russia and the Ukraine, and to the response and policies arising in the United States and the West.

The 1990s were a disaster for most of the Russian people. The promise following the successful popular resistance led by Yeltsin against the Communist hardline coup d’etat of August 1991 had turned into the bloody spectacle of Yeltsin ordering the shelling of the Russian parliament in 1993, when legislators refused to grant him the authority to rule by decree in imposing capitalist shock therapy on the nation’s economy. The mafia capitalism and economic decline for the many that followed translated into awesome power and riches for a tight set of neo-billionaire oligarchs around Yeltsin, who were in part celebrated as pioneers among Western elites; and hunger and misery on the Russian streets, as the lifespan of the average Russian male declined by about seven years. The rouble melted down in 1998, while Yeltsin engaged in years of openly drunken displays at international functions and finally resorted to changing prime ministers about as often as his underwear. The FSB’s seizure of power in this situation to establish a new authoritarianism with a democratic face was a criminal response, but under the circumstances it also wasn’t the worst of all possible scenarios. This after all is how many versions of authoritarianism and fascism, overt and covert, have become popular: Putin restored order – the persistence of occasional political assassinations notwithstanding – and reined in the worst excesses of the oligarchs, preventing a sell-off of Russian resources to global capital and in effect establishing a more stable and sustainable kleptocracy that could also allow more growth, more crumbs for the people.

Politics still done by a handful of fixers, an extreme conservative cultural reaction, systematic attacks on the gay population and racial minorities, intermittent and ambiguous campaigns against symbols of Western-style liberalism, and a (continuing) loss of democratic and human rights for dissidents and minorities came with the package. Geopolitically, Putin passed Bush’s test of looking into his “soul” and aligned with the U.S. war on terror: Stealth planes would take off from Missouri and over-fly Russia on their way to bombing Afghanistan.

Then came the 2003 break over Iraq and the formation of the “Old Europe” axis of Russia, Germany and France. Like it or not, through deals with Europe as well as with other authoritarian but nationalist regimes, and through membership in devices like BRICS and SCO, Moscow has participated in creating a loose counterweight to the dominance of Western-based neoliberal capital and U.S. imperial projects – with Russia itself playing a more traditional imperialist power. But there is little evidence this goes beyond the ugliness of realpolitik (or an even understandable self-defense in world context) and extends to a concerted plan motivated by an irrational and “fascist” Russian revanchism to attempt a reconquest of the entire Soviet Union or Eastern Europe that would be doomed to catastrophe. This, however, is the narrative as forged by neocon intellectuals (some of whom sit in the present administration, like Victoria Nuland) and liberal imperialists (like Samantha Powers), and that now finding such purchase on DU.

Which brings us to Ukraine. Another sad case that has seen a succession of kleptocracies in power since its independence following the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union. There is no doubt that last year, the people there had their say against an authoritarian government on the streets. At the same time, there is also no doubt fascist groupings – explicitly, ideologically fascist, invoking the history of Ukrainian ethnic fascism – participated in that. The people in Kiev rose up, yes, but after Yanukovich fled they got an unelected government, with the backing of a U.S. covert but hardly secret intervention that put in power precisely the personnel named by the State Department. This new Kiev government, under a former central banker sponsored by the Ukrainian oligarch Pinchuk, is led by a larger party of Ukrainian hyper-neoliberals kowtowing to the same kind of EU plan for debt slavery and austerity that destroyed Greece. They also employ ethno-nationalist war talk and, as their junior partner, have allied with a smaller party of fascists, who have coordinated the street enforcement.

It’s wrong to speak of the new Kiev government simply as fascist, but it’s sheer denial to blind ourselves to the fascist party within it. How would you respond, if New Democracy took neo-Nazi Golden Dawn on as a junior partner in its governing coalition in Athens, or if Hollande invited members of the National Front into his cabinet, say “merely” to run the family, education and immigration ministries? Here again, we must avoid the false dichotomy wherein if Putin or the Russian state are bad, their opponents must therefore be good. Still in place today without a parliamentary election following the snap presidential election of Poroshenko in May, the Yatsenyuk government from the start exploited Ukrainian ethnic nationalism as a theme to secure a base, in the process demonizing the Russian-speaking minority. They even passed a law to abolish Russian as an official language of the multi-ethnic Ukrainian state. The law was later annulled by the interim president, but the signal was received. Predictably this, first, caused the 90%+ Russian ethnic population of Crimea to opt out of the country immediately. You’re misguided if you think Putin wouldn’t respond to secure and absorb both this population and the location of some of his state’s most important military assets. Like it or not, the atavism is winning out on both sides, but Crimea went to Russia spontaneously, willingly and with almost no bloodshed, notwithstanding the Tatar minority.

The clumsy “kill-terrorists” anti-Russian rhetoric and repression pursued by Kiev also opened the way for an alternate thuggishness in the Ukrainian east, an armed resistance among the large ethnic Russian population there. To see this as the result of a process driven by largely bad actors and the dynamics of fear and hatred on both sides is not to take either side. I am not “pro-Russian,” or in favor of the “Ukrainian” side, and to adopt these terms uncritically plays into the mechanics by which the citizens of a formerly multi-language secular republic are being turned into ethnically motivated antagonists. This has happened before, in Yugoslavia, where many of the young literally were forced to remember that they were supposed to be not Yugoslavians but Serbians or Croatians at each others’ throats, now fight or die. Our own country’s government, unfortunately, has been relentless in taking Kiev’s side, even dispatching CIA and FBI personnel and private mercenaries to assist Kiev in its pacification campaign.

And here we may disagree about what has followed. You may see a strategy of infiltration and material backing of the “Donetsk Republic” by a Russian state aiming at conquest of eastern Ukraine. You may even think that was Moscow’s master plan since the beginning of the Maidan uprising, or even years ago. Whereas, unlike with Crimea, I see no credible gain for Moscow or Putin in an attempt to absorb a territory with a mixed population and a civil war underway – a territory from which the best economic exploitation for Russia would actually follow simply from stabilizing the situation and making Ukraine pay its Russian gas bills with money borrowed from the EU-IMF (said money then to be owed back to EU-IMF for all eternity, but hey, that’s what a working class is for). By the way, to oppose EU policy and the current dominance of neoliberalism and authoritarian governance within the EU during this period of internal economic crisis and class warfare is not to be “anti-European,” and no more valid than the other false dichotomies I’ve mentioned. I consider my stance to be pro-European, and I also see realpolitik for Moscow in continuing to strengthen its economic dealings with the EU and especially Germany.

The alternative for Moscow, i.e., the aggressive strategy attributed to it by the neocons and others in the West, would be to receive hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Ukraine and to generate an endless new Yugoslavian-type war on its borders, in the process physically separating itself from Europe: a war that can have no winners on the ground, only graveyards in different colors, but one that may, indeed, serve some sick geopolitical aim hatched by schemers in more than one far-away capital. Say what you will of Putin, and he may be even worse than you think, but since his bloody rise he has acted not as a chaos agent – this is not a realpolitik interest of Russia’s, and it certainly wasn’t working under Yeltsin – but as a stabilizer of Moscow’s power and rule. At the same time, his own power though great is hardly without any condition. He depends on the nationalist and conservative currents and tropes he rode to greater power (and that he appears largely to believe in), and he can hardly have his base see him as selling out ethnic Russians being massacred by the upstart Kiev “fascists,” or be too vigorous in preventing help to the Ukrainian Russians from Russian citizens; not to mention Russia’s own bloody mercenary-militarist elements. The best chance for reining the latter in, actually, may be coming right now in the wake of the MH17 shootdown and resultant death of hundreds of completely uninvolved and innocent foreigners, mainly Dutch and Malaysian. This is a time when a Western realpolitik that favors peace and not more war should not be scoring cheap points in demonizing Putin, but encouraging him to seize the opportunity of stopping Russian support for Donetsk, ending the conflict, establishing peaceful conditions. Who doesn’t want that?

With regard to the airliner, a rational person should rule out nothing as the events unfold and the seemingly tainted investigations proceed, and there are legitimate questions to ask (such as why passenger flights were still going over a warzone that had seen multiple downings of aircraft, but I figure the answer lies in corporate fuel costs and not a conspiracy). The fact is that until that moment Kiev militarily controlled the airspace, and the Donetsk militias were the ones trying to shoot down planes. Thus it is near-certain they used one a BuK array captured from the Ukrainian military to mistakenly target MH17. Since then, the Kiev government has broken out into a rabid display of rhetoric about “terrorists” run directly by Putin (sadly echoed here on DU) with the implication of an intentional strike on foreign civilians, as insanely counter-productive as that would have been for Moscow and the rebels. In this behavior, as with earlier moves, Kiev seems to want to stoke hostility between the West and Moscow. Yet it’s the Donetsk side who have shown the actions of a guilty party in the question of who shot down the plane, and it’s been a truly ugly and inhumane display.

The Ukrainian hostilities have also seen willful massacres of civilians, on both sides, and there have been serial and awesome lies as a matter of course, on both sides. To me it’s also clear the decision to escalate this into war originated in Kiev, with a government that has acted illegitimately since its accession, and also clear that the Yatsenyuk government and some of its backers and allies have the most to gain (or also to lose) in the gamble of escalation. Is it possible for me to say that, after all of the above, without promptly having you throw labels of “fascist” and “Putin lover” at me? And can we have a discussion of U.S. policy in all this without the pretense that there isn’t a U.S. policy, that it’s just a series of responses to the barbarism of the irrational grasping Putin and his “terrorists”? Because there was a U.S. policy prior to Yanukovich’s departure, and it was to help see him go and put Yatsenyuk’s group in charge. And since then there has been a clear U.S. policy, backed by material support, to favor the new Kiev government in everything it does. I don’t support the U.S. policy. I’d like to be able to say so here and receive intelligent, thoughtful reponses that agree, disagree, add, or give a different analysis. Thank you.

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