Love, Russian style…
The day of anti-Russian solidarity of Ukrainians, which the followers of Konstantin Zatulin and Sergei Glaziev together with our “Red commanders” had been bringing closer as hard as they could, has at last come. The press, social networking sites, verbal utterances on stair landings and at public rallies suddenly began to breathe with feelings born by nonviolent integration. No, we have not taken a different attitude to great Russian culture, to millions of not-so-happy people from Kursk to the Kuriles, to our friends, classmates, business and art partners. We have just become aware of a baneful influence of the Russian governmental machine on the surrounding space and the life of all people. A whole stratum of the Russian state’s history has imperceptibly come from a textbook-sterile past into a present full of amazing events and emotions. We felt as if we were the Poles in front of Muravyev the Hanger’s bayonets, the Finns in front of Stalin’s divisions, the Czechs surrounded by Soviet tanks, the Chechens under the fire of Russian multiple rocket launchers, or the Georgians on their homeland occupied by the troops of a fraternal nation…
The empire which we have considered ourselves part of for hundreds of years looks increasingly clearer from aside. Now we notice in its face the features that were previously hidden by brotherly tolerance and political makeup. What catches the eye is cruelty towards friends and neighbors, the arrogance and loutishness of top functionaries. This only confirms the warning of the past centuries’ intellectuals who managed to fathom the illusory and real mysteries of the Slavic soul. Nikolai Berdyaev wrote that for “Russian man always views force as violence and cruelty… We are not accustomed to looking at force from the moral point of view, to seeing it as discipline of spirit and training of character. The Russian people tend – out of self-preservation instinct – to yield to an external force so that it does not crush them…” This evidently lays bare the roots of a non-conventional attitude to those who surround you. “He beats, therefore, he loves” is not only about jealous and unrestraint husbands.
The Finns liked the regime of Lenin who allowed them to withdraw from the USSR. Stalin mowed away all the sprouts of good-neighborliness by unleashing a shameful and totally unnecessary war. The Czechs and Slovaks worshipped Soviet liberator soldiers from 1945 onwards, only to be humiliated and insulted by invader soldiers 23 years later. The Russian leadership declared, without batting an eyelid, the Georgians, who had ethnically and culturally blended with Russia, a hostile nation. They did the same to us. They kept a deck of marked cards under a tablecloth embroidered with the patterns of eternal friendship, common faith and history. Calling loudly for a fair play, they would quietly turn off gas taps. They set up cordons sanitaires on the way of our goods, torpedoed Ukrainian aircraft construction, thwarted contracts, hindered the establishment of the local church, and waged an overt information war.
This in fact showed the cardinal difference between Russian imperial identity and all the other known identities. The Russians like to beat – or “hit in the outhouse,” in the parlance of their leaders, – friends to scare foes. The algorithm of behavior is always the same. In any place which the paws of Russian goons can reach, violence and coercion are the main argument. In case hands cannot reach the place, money steps in. Unlike the Austrians, British, Americans, and all the others vested in imperial togas, our northern neighbors do not pay for loyalty – especially now that the glut of wealth in a considerable part of the world has come into possession of a narrow circle of private persons who are not exactly bursting to share. Greed prompts the establishment to make low-budget decisions about the Customs Union. The recalcitrant are being drawn into it by force. Sanctions are being applied to a Thumbelina-size Belarus, which meekly turned herself over to the tender mercies of a gigantic sister, as if she were an old enemy. What about our insincere negotiations with Russia? There are so many interpersonal threads woven into the interstate relations tissue that it has turned into an intimate blanket. You can’t possibly see because of this whether Vladimir Putin does not like Viktor Yanukovych with Aleksandr Lukashenko or the countries that have willfully come out of his control.
Great Rus’, which once rallied us together into the USSR and now into “an eternal union of fraternal peoples,” has found itself alone in the whole world, without friends or sympathizers. If you mentally travel along its boundless borders, you can feel sparkling contacts with the enemy territories: the American Alaska, as cold as the half-century-long war which no resets can ever stop; Japan waiting for its islands to be returned; China threatening to populate the barren expanses of Eastern Siberia; the so far quiet wide steppes of Mongolia and Kazakhstan; the Orthodox and Muslim Caucasus which never stops fighting the double-headed eagle; the old Turkish gambit with present-day differences over gas. We, Ukraine, are a brand-new enemy, as are the Moldavians also being “educated” with sanctions. The little republic has nothing but grapes, so the punishment vector is aimed at wine. Then Belarus is gradually reaching the status of adversary. The Baltic States and Poland need no explanations – they have long had an anathema pronounced on them.
But bleak clouds are not hanging over the borders alone. A half of the world is looking warily and cautiously at Russia. The black continent prefers European and American handshakes to Russian hugs. Che Guevara’s followers have gone out of vogue in Latin America. The sons of the Vietnamese air defense soldiers who used to shoot down US pilots are now looking to Beijing and Seoul, not to Moscow. The Arabs no longer remember the Aswan Dam and prefer to buy weapons without any love lyricism. The Balkan nations were not afraid, for some reason, of NATO bombs and went to the European Union, as if it were a celebration, together with Bulgarian brothers and other longtime Warsaw Pact and Comecon partners.
Why is partnership with Russia so unattractive? And, in general, does a huge country, a G8 member, have any friends? For the UK, the US, Germany, and France – countries not exactly whiter than white – do have some… But Moscow has almost no admirers, except perhaps for a cornered Bashar Assad and the heirs to North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung, who travel across Siberia from time to time. Is it perhaps because Moscow itself is looking sullenly at the rest of the world? Russian television, whose spiteful beams also penetrate into our homes, will never say a good word about nearby and faraway peoples and countries. Taunting remarks and crude jokes come from the mouths of not the come-and-go studio guests but, alas, of political observers, ministers, and members of parliament. As an ancient maxim goes, whoever scares everybody lives in fear himself. The Russian model of attitude to the surrounding world is an expression of inner fears dissatisfaction with life. The people who rule a country with unique intellectual resources are unable to turn natural wealth into the affluence of their citizens. It is this dissatisfaction that leads to bitterness. It is not easy for a hungry one to sit on a coffer full of gold. It is not easy for the masters of a sixth of the planet to feel isolated from the world.
“It is quite clear now in Russia not only to an individual who thinks at least a little, but also to an altogether illiterate one that he continuously suffers from not only the usual woes that disturb the peaceful life of an individual, but also from the privations caused by the actions of the government which continuously and needlessly torments and oppresses him from all sides with relentless rudeness and cruelty unless he himself becomes one of the few people who oppress all.”
It is a quotation from Leo Tolstoy’s It Is Time to Understand written more than a hundred years ago, when Russian society faced a choice: to change life by a joint effort or to wait for the waves of wrath to sweep away everything on the road of the people who only recognize force. Failing to heed her prophet, Russia chose the road of revolutions, turning fear and violence into the motive force of her subsequent history. By all accounts, the time to understand this catastrophe is still to come.
