Ukraine is no Russia, Russia is no Ukraine

Russian media are feeding their audience loads of unmitigated nonsense about the Ukrainian election and the anti-terrorist operation. Yet even they show quite convincingly that Ukraine is no Russia. Another proof comes with stories on concluding the agreement on the Euro-Asian Union. Ukraine has no intention to send its delegation there.

Now, time has come to realize that Russia is no Ukraine. Also Ukrainians need this, to clearly understand who they will have to deal with in the near future.

In all the speculations about the prospects of the Russia-Ukraine relations one should bear in mind that the Kremlin sees them not so much as foreign policy as part of inner governance. Should the series featuring Ukraine overpowered by fascists and Americans stop, it will be necessary to urgently fill a huge, 90-percent gap in informational and socio-political broadcasting.

There is one more difference between Ukraine and Russia: it is pointless to call the police and army to come over to the people’s side. They are on the people’s side while defending Putin. All statements to the effect that sociology doesn’t show the real picture, the incumbent regime is about to collapse, and Russia is on the verge of disintegrating, are dangerous. One has to face the truth and be aware of the Kremlin’s intentions and possibilities to realize them.

The annexation of Crimea made everyone talk of the Sudetenland. But for some reason the battle for Donbas failed to help remember that Hitler needed the Anschluss of Czechoslovakia to increase the Reich’s military industrial potential. It is too early to talk of the importance of uranium fields in the annexed territories in 1938, but there is a hypothesis that the fact of Nazis acquiring uranium caused a group of physicists write a letter to Roosevelt.

Today it is obvious that the blow is aimed at the territories where the shale gas project was about to start. Therefore, there is nothing impulsive or mad in Russia’s actions. Moreover, after Petro Poroshenko’s emphatic statements concerning non-acknowledgement of Crimea’s annexation, imminent refusal to buy Russian gas, American aid, and inadmissibility of intervention in Ukraine’s affairs one should expect the Kremlin’s further aggressions. Meanwhile, members of the Federation Council and Russia’s representative in the UN are talking about the illegitimacy of the newly elected president.

It would be extremely unwise and dangerous to reduce the causes of all these events to personal ambitions of one individual and his entourage and consider it all just a marginal conflict. No, these are the first steps of Russian Nazism towards global expansion, with all of Russia turned into a terrorist organization.

There is quite a sensible and timely discussion of the causes of terrorism in Donbas. A lot of attention is paid to the poverty of the population. I do not deny it, but I would like to mention that another approach is also possible. Terrorism is not the product of poverty, but of wealth: in today’s world, it is a very costly enterprise. Network Islamist terrorism is supported by oil dollars and driven by the ambition of wealthy men with a status to establish themselves in an alien world. Ever tried to reckon the costs of separatism in Donbas, the price of the corrupt military operation in Crimea, the sums to pay off the corrupt cops?

Oil and gas dollars are the key destabilizing factor in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and elsewhere, along with the horde’s ambition to play the figure of influence. And this factor is irremovable.

I can hear pathos in the voices shouting ‘There is another Russia!’ There might have been, but it will be gone before long. Or maybe, it does not exist at all: a Russia which adequately assesses its own place in the world.

Twenty-five years has passed since the opening of the First Congress of People’s Deputies. Now Russia is undergoing another phase of its usual cyclic, ahistorical movement in time. However, only Russia, and not all the nations of the USSR. Today we can clearly see that the key mistake of Russian democrats at that Congress was ignoring the delegations from the other Republics.

Meanwhile, it was the main thing. It was a real resistance to Russian totalitarianism rather than an attempt at correcting or rebuilding it, or adapting to it, integrating in the ruling elite. Just like after the October revolt the main thing was national rebirth, brief and bright, of the Empire’s peoples, rather than the Bolsheviks’ strife with other parties, and later, with the Whites.

Alas, the knowledge of all this cannot change anything. Russia is slipping into shadows again. As usual, it is impossible to set right something inside the country: Russia has never had inner sources of development. Senseless and merciless: it is always the struggle for a new tsar, not for freedom. And only pressure from the outside world can result in yet another renewal of the Russian social order, but it will aim at further improvement of totalitarianism. This is what was the aim and the result of perestroika, for this end the First Congress convened 25 years ago. However, the empire expired, but the new leaders of the Russian people, enjoying an absolute support, are trying to repair the situation.

Putin has consolidated not only the elite, and not only the masses. He has also consolidated the intellectual mainstream, considerably expanding the huge influence of agitprop in mass culture. In today’s Russia we can see the transformation of the position of many very recent ardent critics of the Kremlin. Now they fill the traditional and very convenient niche as peacemakers. Below I would like to quote a few leaders of Russia’s mainstream (without giving their names), with their original spelling and punctuation.

“I would like to openly state that I am absolutely against the ‘anti-terrorist operation’ in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, and the news of all its victims fills me with bitterness.

“No, unlike many fashionable bloggers, I absolutely do not share the admiration for ‘people’s republics’ or their leaders, Russian soldiers of fortune and local criminals. And I am worlds apart from the ideology of Prokhanov, Dugin, Limonov, Barkashov and other apologists of these ‘republics.’

“However, I am convinced that no one can be forced to change their beliefs. And if a considerable proportion of the population of certain territories want to create a ‘red-and-brown Russia of 1993’ at home, they have every right to it. No one should stand in their way, they should be able to try and do it.

“Yes, certainly, a question arises of the fates of those inhabitants of Donetsk and Luhansk, whose lives and well-being is under threat in those ‘people’s republics.’ Here I mean intellectuals, the urban youth, students, entrepreneurs, Jews, Gypsies, gays and all the other categories of people who provoke extreme hate in today’s ‘anti-fascists.’ Yet replacing them to other regions of Ukraine would not be much more difficult and expensive, in my opinion, than carrying out a full-scale military operation. It would be better to concentrate on this option.”

Or another one:

“I believe it would be correct to offer political asylum in Russia to the activists from Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, who are afraid of persecutions in Ukraine. Not that I would see them among my fellow citizens, but actually it is the Russian leaders who (voluntarily or not) caused many to take steps, which they would have hardly dared take on their own. If Putin does not want to look a complete traitor, he will probably see to it. And it would be best to do it publicly.”

And some more:

“Solving the problem European style would involve a total amnesty and armistice, wide assistance in transforming all the activists of the DNR and LNR into a legal separatist party, which are quite common in Europe. Alas, such solution is hardly possible, unfortunately: the government in Kyiv is publicly promising to destroy the enemies. This will lead to further escalation, and if the death toll reaches thousands, the intervention of the Russian Armed Forces is not to be excluded.”

Three different authors, who write as one. Well, maybe this is an agitprop campaign. Or maybe, usual intelligentsia’s herd instinct. It does not matter, actually. In any case, we witness the capitulation of the mind, giving up one’s individual stand, drifting towards integrating into a new socio-political order. Such statements are becoming a condition for the preservation and consolidation of [the authors’. – Ed.] social status.

It is these individuals that Ukrainians are to engage in a dialog with. They have already come to Kyiv together with Khodorkovsky, they are going to come again in the fall, to instruct Ukraine again. We can only hope that the victory of the Ukrainian army will at last put an end to Russians’ ironically haughty attitude to all things Ukrainian.

Some might want to account for my opinion by the fact that I do not get invited to those conferences, and therefore I am trying to inspire distrust for Russian intellectuals. They are right to leave me behind, I must say. My standpoint is absolutely marginal, if not unique, and in Russia is perceived as typical for eccentrics, losers, and God’s fools. I am not published by either pro-government or liberal media. Meanwhile, a participant of such dialogs should be an opinion leader, an outstanding representative of the mainstream, capable of influencing the government and the public opinion. Such people, indeed, would make it possible to evaluate the situation and sentiments in Russia.

Dmitry Shusharin is a Moscow-based historian and political journalist