New Yorker, United States
Boundary Issues
by David Remnick
August 25, 2008
On a bright September day in 1993, not long before he ended his two
decades in exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered a rare public
address in Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein. Although Solzhenitsyn
was energetic at the lectern, he was all but finished with his epic
work as the chronicler of Soviet cruelty. With `One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich,’ `Cancer Ward,’ `The First Circle,’ and, above all,
`The Gulag Archipelago,’ Solzhenitsyn had not only exposed the secrets
of Soviet oppression and ruin; he had also presaged the collapse of
Communist ideology and Moscow’s empire.
But, in Vaduz, Solzhenitsyn, a principled conservative, could not join
in the West’s euphoria. He was deeply aware that the costs of
ideology, violence, and empire had not been paid in full. While
American triumphalists were still indulging in clichés of how
Ronald Reagan had won the Cold War, Solzhenitsyn anticipated the
persistence of the old and unrepentant élites, the former
Communist Party chiefs and K.G.B. officials who so easily transformed
themselves into `democrats’ and `businessmen’:
We were recently entertained by a naïve fable of the happy
arrival at the `end of history,’ of the overflowing triumph of an
all-democratic bliss; the ultimate global arrangement had supposedly
been attained. But we all see and sense that something very different
is coming, something new, and perhaps quite stern. No, tranquility
does not promise to descend on our planet, and will not be granted us
so easily.
Solzhenitsyn died on August 3rd, and he was buried near Turgenev in
the graveyard of the Donskoi Monastery. Vladimir Putin, the former
K.G.B. operative and Russia’s de-facto President, unabashed by irony,
paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn’s service to `the ideals of freedom,
justice, and humanism.’ Later that week, while attending the opening
ceremony of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Putin discussed with his
seatmates and fellow heads of state a non-sporting matter: he had
ordered his tanks and troop trucks into South Ossetia, in the
Caucasus. His Army also attacked Georgia proper, most forcefully the
city of Gori, the birthplace of Iosef Dzhugashvili’better known as
Stalin, who in his day helped redraw the volatile mosaic of the
Caucasus.
Part of the `naïve fable’ was that the collapse of the Soviet
Union would peaceably defy historical precedent. Empires, blinded by
hauteur and ambition, don’t often stoop to understand the complexities
of their human and territorial acquisitions, and care even less about
the disfigurements and time bombs they eventually leave behind. The
record is long: after the Ottoman decline came the slaughter of
Armenians and the drawing of senseless boundaries in the Middle East;
imperial Britain left in its wake the wars in Ireland, Palestine,
Nigeria, and the Indian subcontinent; the French provided a legacy of
imminent violence from Algeria to Indochina.
Nor was the Soviet breakup the result of precision engineering; its
dangers, similarly, were only briefly concealed. In December, 1991, at
a vodka-soaked confab in a hunting lodge near the Polish border, the
Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, and the leaders of Belarus and
Ukraine dissolved the union formed by the Bolsheviks and their tsarist
predecessors, instantly depriving Mikhail Gorbachev of employment. `I
well remember how a sensation of freedom and lightness suddenly came
over me,’ Yeltsin wrote of the event. Putin, Yeltsin’s successor, who
spent the perestroika years seething with resentment as an
intelligence officer in East Germany, saw it differently. Burning
secret documents as the Berlin Wall fell, Putin felt abandoned by the
Party and by the empire he had been brought up to protect; he later
called the collapse of the Soviet Union `the greatest geopolitical
tragedy of the twentieth century.’
Promises of a voluntary and effective commonwealth of liberated
nations soon became a rueful memory. With the lonely exception of the
Baltic states (particularly Estonia), democratic development came
slowly and fitfully to the former republics, when it came at all. The
Central Asian republics’the `stans”ranged in political shape from a
North Korean model in Turkmenistan to an oil autocracy in Kazakhstan
run by a dynast from the Communist era. Belarus is run by a petty
dictator, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who informed a German newspaper that
`not everything connected with that well-known figure, Adolf Hitler,
was bad.’ In Azerbaijan, the patriarch Heydar Aliyev, a K.G.B. general
in his salad days, bequeathed the nation’s throne to his son,
Ilham. And so on. The levels of autocracy, criminality, tin-pot
cronyism, and resurgent nationalisms emerged on such a heroic and
ruinous scale that the historian Stephen Kotkin has referred to the
less fortunate republics of the former Soviet Union as
`Trashcanistans.’
Moscow did not engage in large-scale violence in the post-Soviet realm
until 1994, but, not surprisingly, when it did it centered on the
Caucasus’for centuries a cauldron of ethnic emotion and battle. By
levelling the Chechen capital, Grozny, Yeltsin reënacted the
tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, a politician whose early liberal intentions
were overwhelmed by his commitment to a senseless and unwinnable
war. Vladimir Putin has none of Yeltsin’s democratic pretensions. His
focus is Russian power and its reëstablishment. And, even as
the world rightly condemns his ruthless invasion of Georgia, imagining
the world as he sees it is a worthwhile exercise.
Taken individually, the West’s actions since the collapse of the
Soviet Union’from the inclusion of the Baltic and the Central European
states in NATO to the recognition of Kosovo as an independent
state’can be rationalized on strategic and moral grounds. But taken
together these actions were bound to engender deep-seated feelings of
national resentment among Russians, especially as, through the
nineteen-nineties, they suffered an unprecedentedly rapid downward
spiral. Even ordinary Russians find it mightily trying to be lectured
on questions of sovereignty and moral diplomacy by the West,
particularly the United States, which, even before Iraq, had a long
history of foreign intervention, overt and covert’politics by other
means. After the exposure of the Bush Administration’s behavior prior
to the invasion of Iraq and its unapologetic use of torture, why would
any leader, much less Putin, respond to moral suasion from Washington?
That is America’s tragedy, and the world’s.
There is little doubt that the Georgian President, Mikheil
Saakashvili, provided Putin with his long-awaited casus belli when he
ordered the shelling of South Ossetia, on August 7th. But Putin’s war,
of course, is not about the splendors of South Ossetia, a duchy run by
the Russian secret service and criminal gangs. It is a war of
demonstration. Putin is demonstrating that he is willing to use force;
that he is unwilling to let Georgia and Ukraine enter NATO without
exacting a severe price; and that he views the United States as
hypocritical, overextended, distracted, and reluctant to make good on
its protective assurances to the likes of Georgia.
Inevitably, a number of neoconservative commentators, along with John
McCain, have rushed in to analyze this conflict using familiar
analogies: the Nazi threat in the late nineteen-thirties; the Soviet
invasions of Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. But while Putin’s
actions this past week have inspired genuine alarm in Kiev and beyond,
such analogies can lead to heedless policy. As the English theologian
Bishop Joseph Butler wrote, `Every thing is what it is, and not
another thing.’ Cartoonish rhetoric only contributes to the dangerous
return of what some conservatives seem to crave’the other, the enemy,
the us versus them of the Cold War.
Only one with a heart of stone could fail to be moved by the spectacle
of the leaders of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states standing by
Saakashvili last week at a rally in Tbilisi. But Putin is not Hitler
or Stalin; he is not even Leonid Brezhnev. He is what he is, and that
is bad enough. In the 2008 election, he made a joke of democratic
procedure and, in effect, engineered for himself an anti-constitutional
third term. The press, the parliament, the judiciary, the business
élite are all in his pocket’and there is no opposition. ButPutin
also knows that Russia cannot bear the cost of reconstituting empire
or the gulag. It depends on the West as a market. One lesson of the
Soviet experience is that isolation ends in poverty. Putin’s is a new
and subtler game: he is the autocrat who calls on the widow of
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. To deal with him will require statecraft of a
kind that has proved well beyond the capacities of our current
practitioners.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress