MOSCOW – The impression is that the world, including Ukraine, is unable to adequately assess what is happening in Russia. Remember how the Bolsheviks went about ruining [Russia’s] completely viable economy in the urban and rural areas at the turn of the 1930s? If you do, you’ll stop discussing senility, idiocy, you name it. You will realize that Absurdistan is being built in Russia.
Absurdistan is immune to social cataclysms because they are part of the building process. In fact, they are provoked. Ditto warfare. So far there is no way to do anything about what is going on. The West won’t help. Rather, it will help Putin even if he destroys all Western businesses in Russia. The West will help him out of fear, having realized that Putin is capable of anything, including the use of nuclear weapons and any means of destabilizing the political regimes in the West.
Below I will focus on the nuclear threat and population.
The Russian media are said to be no target for accusations of falsehood because they have openly taken a lying stand. They didn’t lie only once when Dmitry Kiselev, one of Russia’s most influential television hosts, appeared on the evening news in Moscow [in mid-March, 2014, before a huge mushroom cloud graphic] to remind viewers that Russia is still “the only country in the world capable of turning the US into radioactive dust.” A statement strongly reminiscent of one made by the “father of the Russian A-bomb,” [Stalin’s number-one hangman, NKVD chief] Lavrenty Beria who threatened to grind the enemies of the Soviet state into “camp dust.”
This was the first open threat of using nuclear arms recorded in human history, voiced not by an outcast regime like North Korea, and not in a local conflict – as in the verbal skirmishes between India and Pakistan – and yet no one has since appeared to be willing to admit that Russia has thus become a nuclear blackmailer.
We are witness to a historical coup, a revision of the principles of Russia’s politics for the past 60 years, rejecting peaceful coexistence and peaceful competition. Beginning with the 20th [Soviet Communist Party] Congress, Russia has positioned itself against the civilized world, seeking to prove its superiority in the course of peaceful development – while never hesitating to use force. Now it has entered the phase of revising national frontiers and seizing foreign territories, ruining the entire European security system, resorting to nuclear blackmail. Russia has thus openly admitted its fiasco in the peaceful competition game (which game it had actually been playing solo). This coup [in Russia’s politics] occurred in the absence of any economic preconditions, for no reasons except the elite’s lasting lust for unlimited power. Add here the Russian nation’s wrong choice of a president programmed to confront the rest of the world.
No one [in the West] is prepared to admit as much. Everyone is expecting the situation to get settled, that the crux of the matter is Putin, his personality, maybe other trifles that are getting to be thorns in everyone’s side.
The world keeps living in the past. When I broached the nuclear blackmail subject the other day, a man (who knew what he was talking about) sent me this useful link: (http://news.kremlin.ru/ ref_notes/461) – Russia’s military doctrine. I found the following passage: “The Russian Federation reserves the right to utilize nuclear weapons in response to the utilization of nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and (or) its allies, and also in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation involving the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is under threat.” The entire world had an opportunity of familiarizing itself with the Kremlin’s stand, namely its being prepared and willing to be the first to “utilize nuclear weapons,” yet no one took it seriously. One is reminded of the politicians in the West [back in the 1930s] who didn’t seem aware of the Nazi threat, saying later they’d have acted differently, had they known – but even then Hitler made no secret of his plans and acted in accordance with his declarations.
It is clear that rotation is underway in the Donbas, with nincompoops in uniform being replaced by [Russia’s regular] military and spetsnaz pros. This is a step-by-step process, with the international community getting used to the idea of Russian troops fighting on Ukrainian territory. Putin is destroying Ukraine while the West covers for him. Hitler took over Czechoslovakia’s industrial potential after seizing that country. Putin doesn’t need the seizing part of the game. He simply has what he needs [in Ukraine] transferred to Russia, using humanitarian aid convoys, as in the case of Luhansk, with no one [in Europe] getting in his way.
Politicians in the West are sticking to the stinking cliche about there being no military solution to the Donbas conflict. World history shows that this kind of problem requires a military solution, in order to spill less human blood.
Putin doesn’t have to win [this proxy war with Ukraine]. All he needs is to allow the situation to evolve until manpower losses and further damage become unacceptable – when people in Ukraine start joining anti-war rallies. Another possibility is that Putin will emulate Georgia’s example and bank on the approaching parliamentary elections in Ukraine. No attempt has been made in Ukraine to determine the electorate’s attitude to the war. There is no reliable information about the social moods in Ukraine, especially in view of the regional distinctions. Here no slogans will help. The elections in Georgia, in the aftermath of the war with Russia, are a lesson [for Ukraine]: elevated national moods far from always embrace the entire nation; they tend to become illusory.
Assuming that public opinion in Ukraine is a mystery, that of Russia is clearly apparent. The absolute majority is all out for Putin, with the opposition’s forecasts proving totally ineffective.
This kind of public support essentially differs from what one finds in a democracy because a totalitarian regime needs no public support, when a free citizen makes his/her free choice – because this regime does not need a free citizen, because under this regime the very notion of choice is unthinkable and regarded as criminal. In today’s Russia the absolute majority are people who feel happy because those “upstairs” relieve them of the responsibility of making a choice. These people ask no questions and they love Putin. Yet there is more to the notion of loyalty there.
During the election campaign there emerged the coinage “Puting,” meaning mass public actions, organized using good old Soviet propaganda techniques, in support of those currently in power, namely voluntary-forceful gatherings of participants with slogans and posters prepared well in advance, and well-rehearsed standing applause.
A number of observers were sure that those who had taken part in such Puting actions would vote against Putin after suffering the campaign organizers’ humiliating treatment. What happened was the exact opposite. There emerged what could be described as the Humiliated Victims Association. When humiliated, one is left with hatred and contempt. Putin and his team remain low-level managers – in other words, they know how to manipulate an individual, even communities, using their weakest points and worst traits.
In Russia, whichever step the opposition took only helped Putin. Its populist and social voyeurism, every effort to fight the “party of crooks and thieves,” along with tabloid stories about ranking bureaucrats’ mansions, also addressed the worst human traits. [To quote from Gogol’s play The Inspector-General] all of the opposition’s activities boiled down to telling Derzhimorda “not to be so free with his fists.” And nor did they raise enough stink about the Governor privatizing the city.
Putin and his inner circle have privatized the Russian state, robbing the Russians of their Motherland. One is reminded of Ivan Ilyin’s formula that the state, in its spiritual essence, is nothing other than the homeland, formed and united by public law, or a great many people related by a common spiritual destiny, constituting a unity on the basis of spiritual culture and legal conscience.
It is also true that Russians didn’t mind being robbed that way. In fact, they felt happy being robbed like that. They proceeded to ruin some of the neighboring states, to punish them for refusing to surrender their property to a gang of thieves.
Russia, however, is not the biggest threat facing Ukraine. Russification is, on a global scale, including Europe and Ukraine. This Russification is not on a daily language, even political basis, but in terms of essence, values, on an existential basis.
Those who claim that the destiny of Ukraine is determined by Russia and Germany, in collaboration with France, aren’t wide off the mark. Putin doesn’t have to put any ideas into the European political minds. Being able to decide the destinies of peoples – what more can one ask for? This happiness is matched only by having such peoples who can do without such luxuries as human rights.
War is what helps bring various peoples closer together. The Cold War served to bring Russia closer to America. The Americanization of Russia was profound. [Russia’s] current confrontation with Europe leads the latter to essential Russification. There is also the danger of Russification in Ukraine, including vulgar borrowings such as “The mind’s unable to fathom Ukraine” [vs. Fyodor Tyutchev’s poem “The Mind’s Unable to Fathom Russia...”]. However, the most alarming thing, in terms of the European Association Agreement, in Russia’s agitprop, in the mind of Russian in the street, is Ukraine turning into a US/EU puppet.
Regrettably, I’ve heard from some Ukrainian interlocutors that Ukraine wants to choose a suitable “bed partner” from between Europe and Russia. Well, this is a perfectly Russian vision of the world, an absolutely Russian portrayal of Ukraine. Europeanization, unlike Russification, does not encourage such bed partnership.
Right are the Solidarity activists who keep warning Ukraine against entertaining big hopes for help from the West. It has to be talked into providing such assistance, no forceful methods allowed. Europe must admit that there is an independent as well as uncontrolled Ukraine. A job that’s easier said than done. As I’m writing this, I can hear TV news about Russia’s invasion getting on a larger scale in Ukraine. For Russia, this one is another local war – one of many Russia will wage ad infinitum. The choice for Ukraine is simple: total war or death.
