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Russia on the rampage
Moscow wants to return to the imperial ethos that defined it under the monarchical tsars and the communist commissars.
- By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 22:59 September 12, 2008
- Image Credit: Illustration: Guillermo Munro/Gulf News
Okay, now they have backed off from the the brink and are in business again: Russia and the West are not after all heading toward a new Cold War over Georgia, a prospect the neocons, noted for the belligerence of their ideology, would have dearly welcomed.
In the month since the Russian invasion of that former Soviet republic on the night of August 7, the Bush administration has opted to embrace a policy to help Georgians rebuild their country ($1 billion in aid is not chump change) without poking the Russian bear in the eye, and Europe's leaders, meeting on September 1, simply agreed to "condemn" Russia's incursion and to "hold off" talks on a new partnership agreement between Russia and the EU until Russian troops return to their positions of August 6. Hardly a stance that would scare Moscow to hell, disabuse its leaders from any further attempts at dangerous gamesmanship, or hold them back from mapping the boundaries of "Greater Russia", an entity whose neighbours, seen essentially as vassal states, are expected to kow-tow to Russian dictates or be crushed.
Let's be clear on one thing: the role that Georgia's hot-headed president, Mikhail Saakashvili, played in provoking Russia has been whitewashed in the Western media, as has Saakashvili's violent crackdown on Georgian demonstrators, his rigged election, his declaration of martial law, his incarceration of opposition figures and his attacks on the press. It is difficult to say if the Georgian president was convinced that he would have US backing if he attacked, but once he initiated the conflict, he was made to pay.
That we know. What a lot of commentators, most notably in the Arab media, failed to recognise is post-communist Russia's grim determination to return to the imperial ethos that had defined it under the monarchical tsars as under the communist commissars: not only do you care two-pence about the lives of your own citizens, but you treat brutally the "subjugated peoples" in the neighbouring countries when they get too uppity.
That is a tradition encoded in the historical archetype of Russia as a nation, as a culture and as a polity. Even under pre-communist rule, Russia was a despotic country that, over four centuries, picked on, and picked fights with, its neighbours, particularly the Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus, when it first attacked and ravaged Dagestan in 1604, and then again in 1816 when it appointed the sadistic General Alexei Yermelov as commander in chief to whom was given the task of bringing the Muslim peoples of the region into a state of full submission.
Crime against humanity in Chechnya
Russia's actions in its last two wars in Chechnya in the 1990s were no less than a crime against humanity. Tens of thousands of Chechens died in those wars (reliable estimates put the figure at 50,000), most of them non-combatants. Beyond the dead and wounded they left behind, Moscow's forces also left behind a Grozny, Chechnya's once rustic capital city of 400,000, reduced to rubble.
Over the years, Russia's repression of populations in the subjugated republics, that dared cross it has been no less than a form of rationalised evil and institutionalised sadism rivalled by no other in the world.
But then Russia's treatment of its own population has not been benign either. The Gulag has already entered the world's collective consciousness, and brought to light the troubled history and totalitarian character of Russian rule. The Gulag, essentially a collection of labour camps to which "ideological deviates" were sent to starve, die of the cold or be worked to death, was put in place in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. By the end of the 1930s, these dreadful camps could be found in all 12 of the Soviet Union's time zones - and continued to expand throughout the early 1950s. By the time Stalin died in 1953, some 18 million people had passed through them. Of these 18 million, close to five million never returned.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, along with its notional president, Dmitry Medvedev, has come to look at the independence of the former vassal states as a provocation, and at the collapse of the Soviet Union as a humiliation. Collapse of empires is never taken lightly, especially by those who had headed them. To go from a world that the Soviet Union and the United States once dominated jointly till 1991 to a unipolar world lorded over by the US, with Russia virtually left by the wayside, is a bitter pill to swallow. Hence the rise of the Russian nationalist right that seeks, in Medvedev's words, to protect that "region of privileged interest" in parts of the Soviet Union. Ideas espoused by extremist nationalists that would have been dismissed as nutty a decade ago are mainstream today in Russia's public debate.
Georgia is recalcitrant, or aspires to join Nato? Fine, then wait for the slightest provocation by its irresponsible president, and then go on from there to cut the country down to size, cripple its economy, and wrest control of two enclaves in it from the central government in Tbilisi, presumably because a majority of ethnic Russians lived there.
True, a new Cold War is not in the offing - for now. But what might be in the Kremlin's sights? Ukraine, perhaps? With a population of 46 million, of whom 18 per cent are ethnic Russians, could Ukraine shape up as the theatre of confrontation between Russia and the West?
Putin's Russia may have given itself a cheap thrill recapitulating Tsarist imperial grandeur and communist adventurism by invading Georgia and humiliating its bumbling president, but in the end there is a price to pay: Russia may never be welcomed as a European power, and accepted by people around the world as a civilised country. That would not be my idea of a nation then able to engage other nations in a global dialogue of cultures.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.
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