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by David
Remnick March 17,
2014 Skip to content Subscribe to The
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BorowitzShopCommentPutin’s
Piqueby David Remnick March 17,
2014 .1.3KPrint More ShareClose
TumblrReddit Linked In Email Pin ItStumbleUpon Keywords Politics;Russia;Ukraine;Crimea;(Pres.)
Vladimir Putin;Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn;(Pres.) Barack ObamaIn 1990,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
emerged from his isolation in Cavendish, Vermont, and issued a vatic
manifesto
entitled “How to Revitalize Russia.” Published at great length in
Komsomolskaya
Pravda, it was a document out of time, written in a prophetic
nineteenth-century voice, with archaic diction and priestly cadences.
Solzhenitsyn, a heroic dissident, was always at the nationalist end of
the
spectrum, but he was not calling for some sort of tsarist revival and
imperial
maintenance. Rather, he endorsed a hyper-local, Swiss-style democratic
politics, a transition to private property, and the dissolution of the
Soviet
Union. “We do not have the energy to run an Empire!” he wrote. “Let us
shrug it
off. It is crushing us, it is draining us, and it is accelerating our
demise.”
Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, along with the Caucasian republics,
were to
make their own way. But on the question of Ukraine he had a different
view.
Russia must be at the center of a “Russian union,” he declared, and
Ukraine was
integral to it. At the time,
Ukrainian nationalists, particularly in the western part of the
republic, were
joining the Baltic states in their bold drive for independence, and had
formed
a “people’s movement” called Rukh. Leonid Kravchuk, a dreary Communist
Party
hack who had previously shown nothing but indifference to Ukrainian
nationalism, won the Presidency, in 1991, by deciding to stand with
Rukh. This
was a trend that Solzhenitsyn, in the woods of New England, and so many
Russians throughout the Soviet Union, could not easily abide. It defied
their
sense of history. To them, Ukraine was no more a real nation than
Glubbdubdrib
or Freedonia. Vladimir Putin, a former officer of the K.G.B., was the
first
post-Soviet leader to deliver a state prize to Solzhenitsyn, who had
spent a lifetime
in a death struggle with the K.G.B.; a large part of their common
ground was a
rough notion of what Russia encompassed. As Putin told the second
President
Bush, “You have to understand, George. Ukraine is not even a country.” Solzhenitsyn, one of the great truth-tellers of the twentieth century, harbored an exceedingly benign view of one of the more ominous figures of the twenty-first. Putin is an unabashed authoritarian. He masks the Pharaonic enrichment of his political circle by projecting an austere image of shrewd bluster and manly bravado. He is also the sum of his resentments. His outrage over the uprising in Kiev, like his subsequent decision to invade Crimea, is stoked by a powerful suspicion of Western motives and hypocrisies. Putin absorbed the eastward expansion of NATO; attacks on his abysmal record on human rights and civil society; and the “color” revolutions in Tbilisi and Kiev—even the revolts in Tehran, Tunis, Cairo, Manama, and Damascus—as intimations of his own political mortality. He sees everything from the National Endowment for Democracy to the American Embassy in Moscow as an outpost of a plot against him. And the U.S. clearly does want to curb his influence; we can’t pretend that he’s entirely crazy to think so. The Olympics was his multi-billion-ruble reassertion of Russian power on the level of pop culture; the invasion of Crimea is a reassertion of Russian power in the harsher currency of arms and intimidation. from the
issuebuy as a printe-mail this.The invasion demands condemnation:
Ukraine is a
sovereign state; it has been for a generation. Its cultural,
linguistic, and
historical affinities with Russia do not make it a Russian vassal.
Putin’s
pretext—that frightened masses of Russian-speakers in Crimea and
eastern Ukraine
were under physical threat from “fascists,” and were crying out for
“fraternal
assistance” from Russia—is a fiction generated by his intelligence
services and
propagated by Russian state television. (Pro-Russian Cossacks in Crimea
are no
less anti-Semitic than the racists among the Ukrainian
nationalists—something
you are not likely to learn on Channel One, in Moscow.) Putin’s
aggression took Western leaders—especially Barack Obama and Angela
Merkel—too
much by surprise, but they have acted since with clarity and prudence.
The
decision to forgo martial threats and to concentrate on strong economic
sanctions and diplomatic exertions is, in a world of radically limited
options,
wise. But not all those most directly involved in this crisis evince an
understanding
of the complicated politics of Ukraine. It is worth remembering that,
in the
back-and-forth of Ukrainian governments since 1991, both the
pro-Russian
leaders, like Viktor Yanukovych, and the pro-Europeans, like Yulia
Tymoshenko,
have been brazen thieves, enriching themselves at fantastical rates.
Both sides
have played one half of the country against the other. And the fact
that the
protests in Kiev were not, as Moscow claims, dominated by fascists and
ultra-nationalists does not mean that such elements are absent from the
scene.
Ukraine has yet to develop the politicians that its fragile condition
and its
dire economy demand. In December, when John McCain spoke to
demonstrators in
Kiev’s Independence Square, he stood side by side with Oleh Tyahnybok,
who was
once expelled from his parliamentary faction after demanding battle
with “the
Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” Perhaps this was bad advance work from team
McCain—much like the advance work on the Sarah Palin nomination—but it
did
manage to fuel Moscow’s bonfire of suspicion. McCain’s
allies in the Senate have shared his propensity for incautious
grandstanding.
Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, who is facing a Republican primary
challenge
from his right, says that the invasion of Crimea “started with
Benghazi.” He
tweeted, “When you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite
this type
of aggression.” And McCain, who alternates with Graham as the voice of
the
G.O.P. in foreign affairs, told AIPAC that the invasion was “the
ultimate
result of a feckless foreign policy where nobody believes in America’s
strength
anymore.” Soon Hillary Clinton, who should know better, pitched in with
an
unhelpful analogy to Hitler. Right now,
Putin retains his familiar strut and disdain. His opposition at home is
on
tenterhooks, fearing a comprehensive crackdown, and the West, which
dreams of
his cooperation in Syria and Iran, is reluctant to press him too hard.
But it
may be that his adventure in Crimea—and not the American Embassy in
Moscow—will
undo him. Last month, a Kremlin-sponsored poll showed that
seventy-three per
cent of Russians opposed interfering in the political confrontations in
Kiev.
The Kremlin has proved since that it has the means, and the media, to
gin up
support for Putin’s folly—but that won’t last indefinitely. In other
words, Putin risks alienating himself not only from the West and
Ukraine, to
say nothing of the global economy he dearly wants to join, but from
Russia
itself. His dreams of staying in office until 2024, of being the most
formidable state-builder in Russian history since Peter the Great, may
yet
founder on the peninsula of Crimea. ♦ |
