Russia vs. Europe
By BILL KELLER
The world needs Nelson Mandelas. Instead, it gets Vladimir Putins. As the South African hero was being sung to his grave last week, the Russian president was bullying neighboring Ukraine into a new customs union that is starting to look a bit like Soviet Union Lite, and consolidating his control of state-run media by creating a new Kremlin news agency under a nationalistic and homophobic hard-liner.
Putin’s moves were not isolated events. They fit into a pattern of behavior over the past couple of years that deliberately distances Russia from the socially and culturally liberal West: laws giving official sanction to the terrorizing of gays and lesbians, the jailing of members of a punk protest group for offenses against the Russian Orthodox Church, the demonizing of Western-backed pro-democracy organizations as “foreign agents,” expansive new laws on treason, limits on foreign adoptions.
What’s going on is more complicated and more dangerous than just Putin flexing his political pecs. He is trying to draw the line against Europe, to deepen division on a continent that has twice in living memory been the birthplace of world wars. It seems clearer than ever that Putin is not just tweaking the West to rouse his base or nipping domestic opposition in the bud. He is also attempting to turn back 25 years of history.
The motivation of Vladimir Putin has long been a subject of journalistic and scholarly speculation, resulting in several overlapping theories: He is the boy tormented in the rough courtyards of postwar Leningrad, who put on a KGB uniform to get even and never took it off. He is the cynical, calculating master of realpolitik, who sees the world in conspiracies and responds in kind. He is a tortured Russian soul out of Dostoevsky, distressed by godlessness, permissiveness and moral decline. He is Soviet Man, still fighting the Cold War. He is a classic narcissist, best understood by his penchant for being photographed bare-chested on horseback.
Since his current presidential term began in 2012, Putin has felt increasingly that his overtures to the West were not met with due respect, that Russia was treated as a defeated nation, not an equal on the world stage. His humiliation and resentment have soured into an ideological antipathy that is not especially Soviet but is deeply Russian. His beef with the West is no longer just about political influence and economic advantage. It is, in his view, profoundly spiritual.
“Putin wants to make Russia into the traditional values capital of the world,” said Masha Gessen, author of a stinging Putin biography, an activist for gay and lesbian rights and a writer for the Latitudes blog on this paper’s website.
What, you may wonder, does Russia’s retro puritanism have to do with the turmoil in the streets of Kiev, where Ukrainian protesters yearning for a partnership with the European Union confront a president, Viktor Yanukovich, who has seemed intent on joining Putin’s rival “Eurasian” union instead? More than you might think.
Listen to the chairman of the Russian Parliament’s International Affairs Committee, Alexei Pushkov, warning that if Ukraine joins the E.U., European advisers will infiltrate the country and introduce “a broadening of the sphere of gay culture.” Or watch Dmitry Kiselyov, the flamboyantly anti-Western TV host Putin has just installed at the head of a restructured news agency. Kiselyov recently aired excerpts from a Swedish program called “Poop and Pee,” designed to teach children about bodily functions, and declared it was an example of the kind of European depravity awaiting Ukraine if it aligns with Europe. (Kiselyov is also the guy who said that when gay people die their internal organs should be burned and buried so that they cannot be donated.)
Dmitri Trenin, a scholar in the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is convinced this is not just pandering to a devout constituency, but also something more personal. In the past two years Putin has become more ideologically conservative, more inclined to see Europe as decadent and alien to the Orthodox Christian, Eastern Slav world to which both Russia and Ukraine belong.
“It’s tolerance that has no bounds,” Trenin told me. “It’s secularism. He sees Europe as post-Christian. It’s national sovereignty that is superseded by supranational institutions. It’s the diminished role of the church. It’s people’s rights that have outstripped people’s responsibilities to one another and to the state.”
To appreciate the magnitude of what Putin is doing, it helps to recall a bit of history.
In July 1989, the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, made a speech in Strasbourg that many took as an important step back from the Cold War. His theme was that Russia now regarded itself as sharing a “common European home” alongside its Western rivals. Mutual respect and trade should replace confrontation and deterrence as the foundations of the relationship. Military blocs would be refashioned into political organizations. What President Reagan dubbed “the evil empire” would be the good neighbor.
“The long winter of world conflict based on the division of Europe seems to be approaching an end,” Jim Hoagland, the chief foreign correspondent of The Washington Post, wrote at the time. It was a common theme.
When the Soviet Union unraveled a few years later, the largest of the 14 republics liberated from Russian dominion was Ukraine. While savoring their independence, many Ukrainians wanted to follow Russia on the path Gorbachev had announced.
“There was this slogan, ‘To Europe with Russia,’ ” said Roman Szporluk, former director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard. “Clearly that idea is now out, and I guess Putin must have decided to restore the empire.”
Nearly 25 years after Gorbachev’s “common European home,” Putin sounds like a common European home wrecker.
It is true that during the recent years of recession and austerity Europe has lost some of its dazzle. But it is still more alluring than Ukraine’s threadbare economy, presided over by an ineffectual and corrupt governing class. Ukrainians have never abandoned their hope to be part of the West. Protesters rallying at Independence Square in Kiev represent a generation that has studied, worked and traveled in Poland since it joined Europe, and that does not want to retreat to some shabby recreation of the Russian empire. They are backed, too, by a significant segment of Ukrainian business, which prefers Western rule of law to the corruption and legal caprice of Russia and Ukraine.
Putin may succeed in capturing Ukraine, but he could come to regret it. While he’s looking to the past, he might linger over the experience of an earlier potentate, Josef Stalin, who annexed western Ukraine from Poland. As Szporluk points out, Stalin thought he was being clever, but he ended up doubling his problems: He brought politically restive Ukrainians into the Soviet tent, and left a stronger, homogenous Poland no longer unsettled by its Ukrainian minority.
Likewise, if Putin dragoons Ukraine into his Russian-dominated alliance, he will need to pacify public opinion by showering the new member with gifts he can’t afford, and ceding it influence that he would rather not share. And even then, resentments of the young Ukrainian Europhiles will fester, and feed the already ample discontent of Russia’s own younger generation. As Trenin points out, “Ukraine will always be looking for the exit.” Putin may learn, as Stalin did, that a captive Ukraine is more trouble than it’s worth.
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