A fit of imperial lust

There are more and more signs of the presidential campaign gaining momentum in Russia. Passions are running high at the regional primaries of the United Russia party and its satellite All-Russian Popular Front. The call of Igor Jurgens and Yevgeny Gontmakher in the newspaper Vedomosty for President Medvedev to run for the presidency received a response in the shape of a Reuters report which is stating that Putin has already decided to run for president (Den, August 2, 2011).

This was followed by the shots of larger-caliber propaganda guns, including the two topmost officials themselves.

Putin arrived at a Nashi (“Ours”) movement camp near Lake Seliger to mingle with young successors to United Russia and the governmental bureaucracy. The subjects of discussion seemed to be, as always, of vital importance: Putin was asked whom to marry (as if this could be solved without the premier), whether the US default poses a threat, and what TV serial the premier likes best. But Putin came not only to have this kind of “fireside chats” but also to do some more serious things.

The premier’s visit to Seliger was preceded by a serious media barrage. There had been broad hints about important statements from the national leader’s mouth. There were some, indeed. Asked by a girl camper about the likelihood of South Ossetia joining Russia, Putin said the republic’s future depended on the Ossetian people themselves. “The border between North and South Ossetia was not the same in different periods of history… You know the standpoint of Russia which supported South Ossetia during the well-known events, when the current Georgian leadership resorted to the well-known military (provocative and criminal. – Author) actions. The future will depend on the Ossetian people themselves.” The premier also mentioned Belarus, calling upon its people “to struggle” for reunification with Russia. At the very beginning of his first presidential term, Putin invited the allied Belarus to join Russia as a six-oblast entity. This triggered quite a harsh reaction from President Alexander Lukashenko, and this issue was put off until better times. According to Putin, these times have come, given a difficult economic situation and a growing anti-regime mood in the allied state.

“As usual, what the premier said had several messages. Firstly, it is a pre-election logic – an overt exploitation of imperial complexes which a part of Russia’s population and, still more, its elite remain infected with. Russia has only been losing its territories in the past two decades. Is it not time to reverse this process and regain something from the nearest territories? And, while South Ossetia has already reached, in the parlance of 1920-40 Japanese militarists and Russian hawks in the condition of a “ripe persimmon,” Belarus is fast approaching this. As a saying goes, you must seize the moment.

Knowing how events of this kind are prepared and who attends them, it is very difficult to believe that both the questions and the answers were spontaneous. Rather, it was a well thought out and calculated preparation, a “smoking gun,” as the Americans say, i.e., a statement that may result in a big scandal.

Moreover, Putin chose again to blatantly violate the Russian constitution, as foreign policy is the exclusive prerogative of the country’s president. The same happened when he commented on the Libya events.

Constitutional requirements and subtleties go by the board, though, when something more important is at stake.

While some anonymous officials said in the Reuters publication that Medvedev lacked “steel,” Putin decided to show the complete absence of this drawback. He is not afraid of any international scandals. You cannot but recall here Andrzej Wajda’s film Man of Iron.

There is one more constitutional detail. Changing the country’s territorial setup and borders requires a nationwide show of approval, such as a referendum. Mikhail Deliagin, director of the Institute of Globalization Problems, is convinced that “only 20 or 30 thousand Russians who reside on the territory of the republic (South Ossetia. – Author) will be asked about whether to join. And nobody will care about the opinion of 140 million Russians who will be paying for this.” As for Belarus, the problem is still more complicated. It is only the Moscow-based Putin who thinks that, for the sake of lower gasoline prices, all citizens of this allied country are bursting to join their neighbors. In reality, it is all too wrong. Although the current situation is very difficult, they will find it much easier to change the ruling regime than to get again into the steel vice in which they stayed gripped for more than 200 years. But for those inside Russia, who find Putin’s words a balm onto the never-healing imperial wounds, the wishes of the neighboring peoples matter nothing when it comes to reviving a single and undivided empire. So they are shown in an easy-to-grasp way who, in fact, truly cares about gathering Russian lands.

Secondly, there is an important foreign policy factor. On the eve of the third anniversary of the Caucasus war, after three years of a “cold peace,” the premier warned Georgia that if it did not change its policy, Moscow could resort again to decisive actions to re-carve the southern Caucasus borders. This will hardly scare President Saakashvili; what is more, this will deal a lethal blow to the [Georgian – Ed.] opposition that is forced to take a pro-Russian attitude in the face-off with the government. But in a big game, pawns are sacrifices without too much reflection. Are those who are vowing fidelity to the Kremlin on Tbilisi squares aware of this?

The next Caucasian addressee of Moscow’s messages is Abkhazia, strange as it may seem at first glance. As the presidential campaign is now unfolding there, opposition candidates can be more often heard calling for a true independence of the country. Sukhumi cannot be compared with Tskhinvali. There is true democracy and quite a strong opposition in the former. At any rate, the outcome of the presidential elections is not at all clear, and a Moscow protege will not necessarily win. Besides, every Abkhazian president was pro-Russian before the elections and then was trying hard, sometimes successfully, to distance himself from “the white-stone [Moscow – Ed.] city.” In addition, Abkhazia has an alternative in the shape of Turkey. This alternativeness goes so far that it causes concern among many in Moscow.

The third addressee is the West and, first of all, Washington. In general, Russia pursues, as the USSR did, a reflex-based foreign policy. For example, no sooner had the US Senate passed a resolution on Georgia, in which Russia is called the occupier that seized Abkhazia and South Ossetia, than there was an ans-wer: you can demand the withdrawal of Russian troops as much as you please, but we will never do this; we will just annex the area, and that’s it. After all, we are the legal successor to a great empire and the USSR, we have paid all their debts, so we are gathering what we temporarily lost due to oversight.

And what about the liberal President Medvedev? He met historians at the Vladimir-based museum complex Palaty. The meeting was held on the eve of a joint session of the presidiums of the Culture and Art Council and the Science, Technologies and Education Council, which was supposed to discuss celebrating the 1,150th anniversary of Russian statehood. Medvedev did not forget about the neighbors. “And you have raised another important question – of our relations, including festive ones, with our nearest brothers, our neighbors. I mean Ukraine and Belarus. I think it would be a very good idea to attract our friends from Ukraine and Belarus to the celebrations, including that of the 1,150th anniversary of Rus’. I think this would be very significant, even though, let me say it frankly, I don’t think I am very ‘sterile’ in my judgments. It seems to me that, let us say it politely, politics affects history in those countries more than it does in the Russian Federation (laughing).”

It is, of course, ridiculous to say that politics has a lesser effect on history in Russia. It has been written very much about the way the history of World War II and the role of Russia in it are being interpreted. In most cases, there is too much expediency and no science in the statements of, say, Putin. Or take the Katyn execution. The president has already said in clear-cut terms about who the initiator and perpetrator of this Polish people’s tragedy were – but to no avail. There is no end to denials and attempts to whitewash “the leader of all peoples” not only in books but also in school manuals approved by the Ministry of Education. Even linguistics is politically tinted.

The historian Ukolova drew the president’s attention to the necessity of publishing a multitier historical encyclopedia. “Incidentally, as far as I know, similar attempts to write this kind of encyclopedia have been made in Ukraine,” she said. Then the pre-sident tried to correct the historian for using the “wrong” preposition to the word “Ukraine” in the Russian language [in Russian, preposition ‘on,’ which is most commonly used to Ukraine, implies the territory rather than political entity. – Ed.]. In his view, even in this case “our neighbors and perhaps brothers resort to pure politics.”

The conclusion is that both the premier and the president of Russia suffer from the same disease. The difference is in words only, while the content is the same. Aleksandr Khramchikhin, in charge of the analytical department of the Institute of Political and Military Analysis, was right to comment on Putin’s statements: “It is a very dangerous precedent. Everybody will have the right to say: look, guys, we need… tanks in order to avoid the Ossetian scenario.” Are the powers that be in Kyiv aware of this?