Average Putin “forces Ukraine to be friendly.” He won't make it [OPINIA]

The most prominent mediocre of the Russian political class called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” (this is about Russian President Vladimir Putin). In our opinion, he caused, first of all, the greatest psychiatric catastrophe in the minds of those who modestly call themselves the Russian political elite, including the “thinker” himself. For decades, these people were united in war neurosis by one obsession: “domination in the post-Soviet space”, creating a “zone of privileged interests”, restoring, in one form or another, the old empire of the Golden Horde/tsardom/Soviet Union.

This happened because Lenin and Trotsky did not try to impose the alien and empty idea of ​​Greater Russia on the peoples of the former empire. The Red Army carried on bayonets, and the commissars in their propaganda, the intoxicating communist promise of social justice and the liberation of the oppressed. It does not matter that this idea later turned out to be false and its implementation criminal; this only came to light later. At the time, it captivated millions of people regardless of nationality and not only resembled a quasi-religion; it functioned as a true new faith.

Andrei Amalrik (Soviet writer and publicist) was absolutely right. Already in the late 1960s, this brilliant dissident who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union wrote that just as the adoption of Christianity extended the life of the Roman Empire by three centuries, the adoption of communism extended the life of the Russian Empire by several dozen years.

The USSR may have collapsed a little earlier or a little later, depending on the scenario, but when the communist religion died first in the souls of its priests and then in the souls of its faithful, the fate of the theocratic Soviet empire was already sealed.

So what can today's Russian “elite”, tormented by phantom imperial pains, offer their former comrades from the great excavation of the foundations of the Soviet project? Nothing but pompous talk about one's own greatness, about the messianic imperial calling of the Russian ethnos (Greek: nation), about the “holy” Chersonesus (Taurid Chersonesos, i.e. the ancient Greek city in Crimea. This was also the name of the entire Crimean Peninsula). But none of this interests anyone except the Russians.

Thieving and incompetent, conceited and cowardly, moving between Courchevel (a French ski resort favored by Russian oligarchs) and Lefortovo (a famous Moscow prison), the Russian political “elite” cannot grasp the simple fact that no one in the post-Soviet space needs it as a moral teacher or a natural gravitational center.

Not because some American or British “spoiled” these countries, but because Putin's Russia cannot be attractive to anyone. Perhaps there would be a few socially close kindred spirits in the post-Soviet space if this wheezing, West-hating “elite” were ready to offer them a serious Grand Anti-Western Ideological Project. But everyone knows where these “new nobles” of the supposedly emerging great power actually store their treasures, where they go for rest and treatment, where they give birth to their offspring and where they pay for their education.

The narcissistic “elite”, lost in its own megalomaniacal fantasies, is unable to take seriously the independence of the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States created after the collapse of the USSR from the former post-Soviet republics), not only formally, on paper, but internally and psychologically. Her astonishing deafness to how her neighbors might react, her spiritual laziness and imperial arrogance, her refusal to make even the slightest effort to see herself through their eyes – all this generates a self-perpetuating cycle of alienation and hostility throughout the post-Soviet space.

Back in 1997, all these phantom grandeur complexes were described in detail in the now infamous text titled “CIS: The Beginning or the End of History?” (an article published on March 26, 1997 in “Nezawisimaja Gazeta” about the CIS becoming a fiction). Since then, the recommendations contained in this work have run like a red thread through endless publications of “experts” dealing with the “near abroad” and have been translated into the Kremlin's actual policy towards the post-Soviet space:

On Ukraine (the authors of the text wrote): “Forcing Ukraine to be friendly; otherwise, gradually imposing an economic blockade modeled on the blockade of Cuba by the United States.”

On the South Caucasus: “Only the threat of serious destabilization in Georgia and Azerbaijan, backed by a demonstration of Russia's determination to follow this path to the end, can prevent Russia's final displacement from the region.”

“Forcing friendship”, a wonderful Orwellian oxymoron, is a merciless self-diagnosis of the mental state of the Russian political class. In today's conflict with Ukraine, these would-be friendship extortionists, the Putins and Solovyovs, are historically condemned to the pathetic role of impotents.

The Russian political class is undergoing a brutal geopsychic breakdown, much more severe than in 1991. Back then, everything still seemed temporary; today it has become obvious that the new reality is permanent. The reassuring ambiguity of the phrase “near abroad” is gone. A new expression is cautiously emerging on the tongue of the Russian anti-Western “elite”: “China's near abroad.” In our desperate attempts to gather at least a few vassals in “our near abroad”, we somehow failed to notice how we were becoming China's near abroad.

The entire Russian “Eurasianism” is in fact ideologically second-hand. It is a function of hostility towards the West and serves the Russian “elite” as a psychological cushion in the critical days of its relations with the same West. All these motifs were perfectly captured in Aleksander Blok's famous poem “The Scythians”. A passionate declaration of love for Europe turns into a threat at the slightest doubt about its reciprocation. If you do not accept us, “we have nothing to lose, and betrayal is in our power… we will turn our Asiatic muzzles to you.” These mood swings are essential for the Russian “elite” as it struggles with its relationship with the eternally hated and eternally loved West. It is not to some random drinking companion, but to the Western skies that the existential Russian question is addressed: “Do you respect me?”

There is no answer.

PS. The main author of this 1997 text was Konstantin Zatulin. To be fair to him, he is not an average man. Much more than Putin himself, he can be called one of the spiritual fathers of the Russian-Ukrainian war. But five years into this war, he seems to have realized the fatal flaws in the ideology that led to it. Zatulin is now talking about it publicly. We should talk to him.