Greetings all,
Below is an interesting article about Russia and Ukraine. Several of the
footnotes at the end are also interesting to read.
For justice and peace,
Sylvie
The Wars of Vladimir Putin
by Timothy Snyder
The New York Review of Books, June 9, 2016 issue
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/09/the-wars-of-vladimir-putin/
Reviewed in this article:
Pozdrowienia z Noworosji [Greetings from Novorossiya]
by Pawel Pieniazek
Warsaw: Krytyka Polityczna, 240 pp. zl34.90
Entscheidung in Kiew. Ukrainische Lektionen [Decision in Kiev: Ukrainian
Lessons]
by Karl Schlogel
Munich: Carl Hanser, 352 pp., €21.90
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New
Russia
by Peter Pomerantsev
PublicAffairs, 241 pp., $25.99
Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos
Vladimir Putin at an ice-skating event in Sochi, Russia, before the
Olympics, April 2013
1989, the year that the Polish war reporter Pawel Pieniazek was born, was
understood by some in the West as an end to history. After the peaceful
revolutions in Eastern Europe, what alternative was there to liberal
democracy? The rule of law had won the day. European integration would help
the weaker states reform and support the sovereignty of all. Peter
Pomerantsev, the son of Soviet dissidents who emigrated to Britain in 1978,
could "return" to Russia to work as an artist. Karl Schlogel, a
distinguished German historian of Russian emigres, could go straight to the
sources in Moscow.
But was the West coming to the East, or the East to the West? By 2014, a
quarter-century after the revolutions of 1989, Russia proposed a coherent
alternative: faked elections, institutionalized oligarchy, national
populism, and European disintegration. When Ukrainians that year made a
revolution in the name of Europe, Russian media proclaimed the "decadence"
of the EU, and Russian forces invaded Ukraine in the name of a "Eurasian"
alternative.
When Pieniazek arrived in Kiev in November 2013 as a young man of
twenty-four, he was observing the latest, and perhaps the last, attempt to
mobilize the idea of "Europe" in order to reform a state. Ukrainians had
been led to expect that their government would sign an association agreement
with the European Union. Frustrated by endemic corruption, many Ukrainians
saw the accord as an instrument to strengthen the rule of law. Moscow,
meanwhile, was demanding that Ukraine not sign the agreement with the EU but
instead become a part of its new "Eurasian" trade zone of authoritarian
regimes.
At the last moment, Russian President Vladimir Putin dissuaded the Ukrainian
president, Viktor Yanukovych, from signing the EU association agreement. The
Russian media exulted. Ukrainian students, who had the most to lose from
endless corruption, gathered on November 21 on Kiev’s central square, the
Maidan, to demand that the agreement with the EU be signed. Pieniazek
arrived a few days later. After police beat the students on the night of
November 30, the young men and women were joined by hundreds of thousands of
others, people who would brave the cold, and worse, for the next three
months.
The "Euromaidan," as the protests were called at first, was multicultural
and anti-oligarchical. Ukrainians were taking risks for a local goal that is
hard to understand beyond the post-Soviet setting: Europeanization as a
means to undo corruption and oligarchy. By enriching a small clique, writes
Pieniazek in his collection of reportage from Ukraine, "Yanukovych brought
the state to the brink of actual collapse." In December 2013 Russian leaders
made financial aid to Yanukovych’s government contingent upon clearing the
streets of protesters. The government’s subsequent escalation of
repression--first the suspension of the rights to assembly and free
expression in January 2014, and then the mass shooting of protesters in
February--turned the popular movement into a revolution. On February 22,
Yanukovych fled to Russia. (Two years later, his political strategist, Paul
Manafort, would resurface in the US, playing the same role for Donald
Trump.) After the failure of its policy of repression by remote control,
Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. By March Russians who had taken
part in that campaign were arriving in the industrial Donbas region of
southeastern Ukraine, Yanukovych’s onetime power base, to help organize a
separatist movement. [1]
Inhabitants of southeastern Ukraine had just as much reason to be
dissatisfied with corruption as anyone else, and it was reasonable to fear
that the revolution in Kiev was nothing more than a swing of the pendulum
from some oligarchs to others. Just how these sentiments might have been
resolved through negotiations or elections we will never know, since the
Russian intervention precluded both, bringing instead fear and bloodshed
that changed everyone’s political calculations. Sloviansk, a small city in
the Donbas, was an early gathering point for separatists. When Pieniazek
arrived there in April 2014, he found the place crawling with armored
personnel carriers, and understood that local opposition to the revolution
in Kiev was supported by outside forces. The Russian citizen Igor Girkin, a
veteran of the Crimean invasion and the commander of the separatist forces,
had made Sloviansk his headquarters.
Under Girkin’s supervision a "people’s mayor" arrested the elected one, and
the new authorities murdered two people who opposed them. When the Ukrainian
government sent policemen to investigate the crime, they were arrested by
the separatists and photographed in humiliating positions--images suggesting
the local dissolution of Ukrainian state power. As Pieniazek reported, power
now resided in the former headquarters of the Ukrainian state police, which
Russian soldiers and officers used as their base.
By March 2014 Crimea had been annexed by Russia, and in April further
Russian annexations of Ukrainian territory seemed possible. Putin spoke that
month of a "New Russia" (Novorossiya), meaning Donetsk and five other
regions of eastern and southern Ukraine. The German historian Karl Schlogel
was following Putin’s language with interest. As he recalls in his new book,
Putin maintained that the use of the Russian language beyond Russia’s
borders justified Russian invasion. If the unity of language groups were
accepted as a principle of rule, then international state borders would
cease to matter.
World War II began from such arguments (think of the Anschluss and the end
of Austria, the Sudetenland and the destruction of Czechoslovakia, and
Danzig as a pretext for war against Poland). Thus the founders of European
integration insisted that state borders be respected and issues of human
rights be resolved within their necessarily imperfect confines. Pieniazek
was continually struck by the fact that separatists characterized the
European order as "fascist," even as they spoke of the significance of
common language and common blood. What they meant, he realized, was simply
that "everyone who does not support Russia is a fascist."
Ukraine is a bilingual country with a cosmopolitan ruling class. Because
almost all Ukrainians speak Russian as well as Ukrainian, they belong to
what Putin calls "the Russian world" (russkii mir). Yet this "world," as
Schlogel shows, is by no means aligned with the politics of Moscow. As he
moved through the Ukrainian east and south in 2014, making erudite
historical sketches of cities, he found an appealing variety. Kharkiv, a
university town near the Russian border, is governed by people who take a
sympathetic view of Russia but have rejected separatism. Dnipropetrovsk, the
onetime Soviet "rocket city," became the gathering point of Russian-speaking
Ukrainian volunteers who fought against separatists and Russians.
Cosmopolitan Odessa excelled in mockery of Putin. [2]
The city of Donetsk fell to the separatists for local reasons. [3] In spring
2014, its local oligarchs were indecisive and tried, disastrously, to play
Kiev and Moscow against each other. This had little to do with ethnicity;
the most important Donetsk oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, is a Volga Tatar. With
local power uncertain, Russian veterans of the Crimean campaign could travel
to Donetsk at a time when Ukrainian central authorities hindered such people
from reaching other east Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv. Afterward Russian
troops could move into Donetsk across a border that Ukrainian authorities
were unable to control. Some of the Russian regular soldiers were Siberians,
and many of the irregulars were Chechens. Thus people who did not speak
Russian were killing people who did--in order to defend the Russian language
in a place where it was never threatened. [4] Schlogel writes:
The city of Donetsk, once home to a million people, became a ghost town,
terrorized by bands of criminals, Chechen war veterans, special forces,
Russian high tech experts, and people who have made careers in public
relations.
That last category was as important as all the others.
Despite the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and separatist control of the
city of Donetsk in April, by May Russia was facing humiliating defeat.
Throughout the country the Russian intervention had, as Pieniazek notes,
"strengthened the sense of Ukrainian identity." The Crimean model of Russian
control was irrelevant in almost all of Ukraine and was failing in the
southeast. In Crimea Russia had a network of local turncoats, considerable
support from local Russians, and military bases from which to launch an
invasion. Without such resources the limited detachments of Russian special
forces, known in Ukraine for their lack of insignia as "little green men,"
could not control the southeast. Four of the six southeastern districts that
Putin called "New Russia" had produced no separatist movement. The
separatist hold on the Donetsk and Luhansk regions was partial and shaky.
The Ukrainian leadership now decided to fight. Although the Ukrainian armed
forces were small, they quickly drove back separatists. Ukraine used air
power to deploy troops and destroy some of the armor the separatists had
seized from Ukrainian forces or obtained from Russia. In May 2014 Kiev was
abuzz with rumors of a Ukrainian offensive on Donetsk. To stop the rout,
Moscow had to bring down the Ukrainian air force. In June Russian troops
crossed the border with tanks and antiaircraft batteries. About a dozen
Ukrainian aircraft were quickly shot down. [5]
The Russian decision to escalate brought about a major war crime. One of the
numerous Russian military convoys in those weeks departed from its base in
Kursk on June 23. It was a detachment of the Russian 53rd Air Defense
Brigade, bound for Donetsk with a BUK antiaircraft missile launcher bearing
the marking 332. On the morning of July 17, this BUK launcher was hauled
from Donetsk to the Ukrainian town of Snizhne, and then brought under its
own power to a farmstead south of that town.
But for what happened next, this transport of a Russian weapon would have
simply been one of several photographed by locals and ignored by the world.
Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, carrying 298 passengers from Amsterdam to
Kuala Lumpur, was flying just then over southeastern Ukraine. At 1:20 it was
struck by hundreds of high-energy projectiles released by the explosion of a
9N314M warhead carried by a missile fired from that BUK launcher. The
projectiles ripped through the cockpit and instantly killed the cockpit
crew, from whose body parts some of the metal was later extracted. The
aircraft was blown to pieces at its cruising altitude of 33,000 feet, its
passengers and their baggage scattered over a radius of thirty miles. [6]
Schlogel could follow the convoy of the BUK on his computer screen. The
young journalist Pieniazek raced to the site where the largest pieces of
wreckage and a number of corpses were found. Although he was the first
reporter on the scene, one day after the crash, its story had already been
told on Russian television. Two Russian networks claimed that Ukrainian
aircraft had shot down the plane. Three other networks provided a motive:
Ukrainian authorities had intended to shoot down an aircraft carrying Putin,
and had made a mistake. Long before the 298 corpses had been assembled and
identified, the victims had been defined in the Russian media: the Russian
president and his people.
In the days that followed, Russian media purveyed further versions of the
disaster: fictional, contradictory, and sometimes grotesque. What Russians
call the "zombie" story, that the CIA filled the plane with corpses and
exploded it by remote control, enjoys surprising longevity. The Russian
tactics are easier to mock than dismiss. A large majority of Russians (86
percent in 2014, 85 percent in 2015) blame Ukraine for shooting down the
flight; only 2 percent blamed their own country, with most of the remainder
opting for the United States. [7]
How did Russia reach a point, in its media and politics, where the fact of
Russian soldiers mistakenly shooting down a civilian airliner during a
Russian invasion of a foreign country could be transformed into a durable
sense of Russian victimhood? For that matter, how did Russians take so
easily to the idea that Ukraine, seen as a fraternal nation, had suddenly
become an enemy governed by "fascists"? [8] How do Russians take pride in a
Russian invasion while at the same time denying that one is taking place?
Consider the dark joke now making the rounds in Russia. Wife to husband:
"Our son was killed in action in Ukraine." Husband to wife: "We never had a
son."
Both the historian Schlogel and the television producer and writer Peter
Pomerantsev make the case that this extraordinary flexibility was the
consequence of earlier developments within Russia itself. "The so-called
Ukrainian crisis," maintains Schlogel, "is above all a Russian crisis."
As the release of the Panama Papers has once again confirmed, Russians and
Ukrainians confront the same central problem: the weakness of the rule of
law. Unlike Ukraine, Russia has natural gas and oil, a strong army, and a
propaganda apparatus that can be used to delay, distract, and confuse.
Schlogel observes that the Russian leadership failed to use the profits from
energy exports to diversify the economy during the flush first decade of the
twenty-first century when prices were high. We should, he thinks, see the
policies of institutional oligarchy, military buildup, and media
coordination as internal and misguided Russian choices that made foreign
wars likely. He notes that other observers have found the Russian propaganda
of ethnic justice and antifascism more appealing than the basics of
political economy. Propaganda conceits of this kind allow Russians to define
themselves as the victims; they permit outsiders, as Schlogel notes, to
discuss the war "without knowing anything about Russia itself."
Pomerantsev spent that glittering decade of mismanagement in Moscow, and he
became the chronicler of others’ hopes and losses. His book presents itself
as the memoir of a young artist with a film he wants to make but cannot. It
would be about the suicides of Russian fashion models, the beautiful girls
who seemed to do so well in post-Soviet Russia but then took their own lives
by jumping from buildings. He describes "a generation of orphaned,
high-heeled girls" seeking security, and not finding it, from older men who
grew wealthy during the 2000s. The mood of the book is one of vertigo, of
crashes that can be delayed and denied but not avoided. The images of one of
his suicide models were circulated in Moscow long after her death, promising
"enchantment."
Pomerantsev arrived in Moscow as the medium of television was brought under
state control. In October 2002, Russian security forces killed 129 hostages
during an attack on Chechen terrorists who had taken over a Moscow theater.
Television cameras recorded the deaths of the hostages. After that,
Pomerantsev says, the last private television channel was brought to heel,
and the state began to orchestrate a misleading pluralism: the TV stations
looked different, but said the same thing. Leaders of accepted parties might
get more or less time on different channels. Their presence was meant only
to confirm the inevitability of Putin.
As Pomerantsev recalls, "when the beetroot-faced communists and the spitting
nationalists row on TV debating shows, the viewer is left with the feeling
that, compared to this lot, the President is the only sane candidate."
Pomerantsev considers the fate of a woman who created her own apparently
legitimate chemical business away from propaganda and politics. But there is
no escape: entrepreneurs in Russia are vulnerable to arbitrary fiscal and
legal reviews at the whims of rivals, and she was arrested (ostensibly for
dealing in illegal narcotics). Behind bars the surreal becomes unavoidable:
"Black is white and white is black," as Pomerantsev paraphrases the
businesswoman. "There is no reality. Whatever they say is reality. [She]
began to scream."
Although Pomerantsev presents such stories as an element of a post-modern
world, a more earthbound reading might be that Russia, like Ukraine, has
failed in the modern task of establishing the rule of law. Many Russians,
for that matter, reacted to this failure in much the same way as Ukrainians
did in 2013. Shortly after Pomerantsev left Moscow, Russians protested the
falsified parliamentary elections of late 2011. Putin claimed that members
of opposition groups had responded to a signal from Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, and Russian police arrested their leaders. This is one
reason much of the Russian elite openly backs Trump over Clinton. (The
other, of course, is their conviction that Trump will destroy US power.)
Though the Russian media followed Putin’s line in 2011, the very fact of the
protests seemed to show that media control and coordination were not enough.
The emerging stratagem was to merge Russian news with foreign news: to make ;
it seem as if much that happened abroad was about Russia, since foreign
leaders had nothing on their minds but the disruption of Russian politics.
In this way Russia’s growing social and economic problems could be ignored
even as Russians believed that they were at the center of world attention.
After the protests, Putin turned away from the middle class and embraced
national populism. The rejection of the EU as "decadent" and the creation of
the Eurasian alternative also arose from this experience. So when Ukrainians
protested in favor of the EU in late November 2013, Russian leaders
understood this within the storyline they were writing for themselves.
Rather than dwelling on the similarities between Ukrainian and Russian
problems and the uncomfortable ability of Ukrainians to demand reform, the
Russian media defined the Euromaidan as an eruption of European decadence.
The European Union was already called "Gayropa"; now the Euromaidan was
called "Gayeuromaidan." Once Russian troops invaded Crimea, happy endings
gave way on television screens to splendid little wars. Russia’s economic
decline continued, but this could now be presented as the price of foreign
glory. Through September 2015, the main subject could be Ukraine. That
October, it changed to Syria.
The new Russian wars are a Bonapartism without a Napoleon, temporarily
resolving domestic tensions in doomed foreign adventures, but lacking a
vision for the world. Ideals are recognized in order to be mocked. "This is
a new type of Kremlin propaganda," writes Pomerantsev, "less about arguing
against the West with a counter-model as in the Cold War, more about
slipping inside its language to play and taunt it from inside."
Authoritarianism is the best of all possible systems--the thinking
goes--because the others are, despite appearances, no better. Lying in the
service of the status quo is perfectly justified, since the other side’s
lies are more pernicious.
All problems, in this worldview, arise from illusory hopes of improvement
aroused by foreign powers. Police power is authentic, whereas popular
movements are not. Killing in the service of the status quo is necessary,
since nothing is more dangerous than change. In the parts of southeastern
Ukraine under Russian and separatist control, millions of people have lost
their homes and thousands their lives, but the property of the oligarchs is
untouched--and those separatists who believed they were fighting against
oligarchy have been murdered. [9]
Must protests for justice bring foreign invasion, stupefying propaganda, and
squalid murder in the name of maintaining the wealth of a few? This is the
essence of Russian foreign policy: enforcing the principle that public
efforts to change politics for the better must bring war and
"normalization"--to use the term made notorious after the Red Army and its
Warsaw Pact allies put down the Prague Spring in 1968. Pomerantsev, who is
concerned with the connections between the late-Soviet and the post-Soviet,
deftly reveals the significance of the revolutions of 1968 as a turning
point in Soviet politics and in dissident political thought.
When Soviet forces crushed the Czechoslovaks’ hopes for "socialism with a
human face," Pomerantsev’s mother was a Soviet schoolgirl. A KGB officer who
had taken part in the invasion later visited her classroom, regaling the
children with stories of the defeat of the Czechoslovak reform movement.
Until then the girl had believed the official version: that the Soviet army
had intervened to stop a Western-backed fascist coup. Surprised by what she
was hearing, she asked: "You mean they weren’t happy to see you?" The look
the KGB man gave her said it all: she was to understand that the official
version was a lie, and that the duty of Soviet citizens was to knowingly
live within such lies.
After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev promised
"fraternal assistance" to any Eastern European country that seemed to depart
from the official line. To Soviet citizens Brezhnev proposed "really
existing socialism," the notion that despite the dreariness of life nothing
better was possible. For KGB men educated in the 1970s, such as Vladimir
Putin, instability and change were the enemies more than any particular
idea. Working in the 1980s in East Germany, he could delude himself that the
status quo was durable--though by then East German stability depended upon
Western economies. It would not occur to him that Brezhnev’s bet on energy
exports and foreign intervention was a mistake; once in power, Putin would
repeat it. The value of a barrel of crude oil (in today’s dollars) when the
USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979 was peaking at $101; when the USSR
self-destructed in 1991 it was $34. When that Russian BUK convoy arrived in
Donetsk in June 2014, the price of oil was peaking at $112; as I write it is
$39.
Eastern European dissidents such as Pomerantsev’s parents drew a different
lesson from the wreckage of 1968: the importance of truth as the foundation
of a life in "dignity"--a term that Ukrainians applied to their revolution
in 2014. [10] Schlogel, a child of the Western European student movements of
1968, is troubled that members of his own generation prefer stagnation to
revolution. He wants to know "why the generation whose own memories are
directed to Paris in May of 1968 did not react to Kiev." Why did so few
people who identify with the left not see the Ukrainian revolution as such,
and not condemn the counterrevolutionary Russian invasion accordingly? Part
of the answer is that many in the West who remember 1968 recall Paris and
not Prague, and so forget the reactionary militarism of the Brezhnev
doctrine. Schlogel is fundamentally concerned about a "deep, metaphysical
illness." He writes that his own generation, which has known Europe in
better times, prefers nostalgia to knowledge. A lifelong student of Russia,
he saw his own journey to Ukraine as an "hour of verification and
self-verification."
There was no Orwell of the Ukrainian revolution, but readers of Schlogel and
Pieniazek will get something like the everyday grit and political insight of
Homage to Catalonia. Pieniazek risked his life to see what he saw, as did
other brave and talented Western journalists. [11] Along the way, perhaps,
he benefited from the seemingly innocuous nature of his work. Because
separatists believed that only television coverage mattered, they kept
asking where his cameraman was. Perhaps because he was filing for print,
Pieniazek found it easier to extend conversations and move from one side of
the lines to the other. After he spent days with a separatist the two men
realized that they had both been on the Maidan on the same day, the one
beating and the other getting beaten. It says something about Pieniazek’s
tact that he kept the relationship going. Pieniazek takes no stands and
strikes no poses, but modestly exemplifies the old dissident ideal of
seeking after small truths, at risk to oneself, in a world of big lies.
With similar humility, Pomerantsev presents his Russian friends as similar
to his Western friends. Their world is just a turn of the kaleidoscope away.
Since the publication of his book, Pomerantsev has noted the affinity of
Trump’s propaganda with the Russian model. The fragility of Russia’s present
regime is little consolation, since its methods of rule could work in the
West; "here," says Pomerantsev, "is going to be there." If the sin of
intellectuals in the twentieth century was to propose utopian visions, that
of the twenty-first is to deny all possibility of change. Schlogel fears a
new trahison des clercs, an abandonment of the search for truth that, says
Pomerantsev, brings the bottomless skepticism that makes political action
seem pointless. "We cannot give up," Schlogel concludes, "on the difference
between fact and fiction." Some things are true, and some things are
possible.
Footnotes
1. For a legal accounting of these events see Thomas D. Grant, Aggression
Against Ukraine: Territory, Responsibility, and International Law (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015).
2. As Serhy Yekelchyk notes: "Ukrainian volunteers and conscripts are more
often than not themselves speaking Russian, meaning that they are fighting
for a civic rather than an ethnic concept of Ukrainian identity." See The
Conflict in Ukraine: What Everybody Needs to Know (Oxford University Press,
2015), p. 18.
3. On pre-war loyalties, see Grigore Pop-Eleches and Graeme Robertson, "Do
Crimeans Actually Want to Join Russia?," The Washington Post, March 6, 2014.
4. In February 2014 Ukrainian authorities proposed the repeal of a law that
allowed Russian to be declared a regional language. They did not in fact
repeal it. The (nearly universal) use of Russian in the Donbas was not
affected either by the passage of the law or the discussion of its repeal.
5. In May 2014 Ukraine held democratic presidential elections, legitimizing
the new order. Putin has now admitted the direct Russian military role in
both Crimea and in the Donbas. At his December 17, 2015, press conference he
said: "We never said there were not people there who carried out certain
tasks including in the military sphere." The Russian military journalist
Arkady Babchenko characterized such circumlocutions as "infantilism raised
to the rank of state policy."
6. Both Russian and Ukrainian officials have claimed, falsely, not to
possess the relevant weapons. Three major reports allow a straightforward
reconstruction of the event: that of the Dutch Safety Board, released on
October 13, 2015, and the open-source series of investigations carried out
by the investigative journalism websites Bellingcat and Correct!v. Whereas
the first focuses on the destruction of the airplane, the latter two
describe the movements of the Russian BUK. In December 2015 Bellingcat
submitted to Dutch prosecutors a list of Russian soldiers believed to have
personal knowledge of the circumstances of the shooting down of MH17.
7. Levada Center, report of July 27, 2015.
8. In the 2014 parliamentary elections, which took place under the pressure
of war, neither of the two right-wing parties cleared the 5 percent
threshold for participation (Right Sector received 1.8 percent and Svoboda
4.7 percent of the popular vote).
9. See Andriy Portnov, "How ‘Eastern Ukraine’ Was Lost," Open Democracy,
January 14, 2016.
10. See Kieran Williams, "The Russian View(s) of the Prague Spring," Journal
of Cold War Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring 2012).
11. Traditional print reporting provided the humanizing counter to the
easier tropes of propaganda. See Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine
(London: Allen Lane, 2015).
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