[update below]
A presidential election is happening in France in three-and-a-half weeks—which is to say, the campaign is now in the home stretch—but one would hardly know it from the daily news coverage, dominated as it is by Ukraine and the actions of Russia’s Hitlerite dictator. E.g. my favorite public affairs talk shows, the excellent C ce soir and C dans l’air (both on France 5), have devoted exactly one segment each to domestic French politics over the past three weeks. We’ve been hearing more about Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy than any of the French presidential candidates apart from Emmanuel Macron—and even then—and for good reason obviously.
I have translated and added subtitles to the latest video speech by Vladimir Putin from two hours ago. Please don’t let it go in vain – I want everyone to see what a speech of true fascism looks like.
No further comment needed, it’s all here, in his speech pic.twitter.com/QEzsG9BODX
— Michael Elgort 🤍❤️🤍🇺🇦✡️ (@just_whatever) March 16, 2022
The Ukraine war has had another consequence for the French presidential campaign, which is to make a Macron victory in the second round—which was already an overwhelming likelihood—a quasi certainty. Marine Le Pen, as it looks today, is the favorite to face off against Macron on April 24th—though a late surge into second place by Jean-Luc Mélenchon is not an impossibility (and personally speaking, I’m hoping for this)—thereby offering French voters the rematch that no one wants, though this time of a candidate of the right—which is objectively where Macron is now situated—versus extreme right, and with Macron winning, though with a narrower margin than in 2017. There will thus be no veritable debate over the really important issues facing France—as Marine LP is not capable of this—and only negative choices for so many voters (I will, along with millions, be holding my nose in casting my ballot for him in the second round).
I had intended to spend this month and next entirely focused on France but, thanks to Vladimir Putin, that plan went out the window. I will indeed have posts on the election but, for now, my attention is mainly on the lands of the former USSR. So instead of going to a movie last Saturday night, I opted to watch Putin’s entire hour-and-a-half speech broadcast (in two parts) on February 21st and 24th (here and here), which was, in effect, his declaration of war on Ukraine—and on the West. If you want to know how the man thinks—and why we are headed for, at the very best, a Cold War far more frigid than the last one—then do take the time to watch the speech (if you can’t bring yourself to do that, you may read the analyses by the NYT’s Max Fisher here and here). There is, to say the least, no possibility of compromise, let alone peaceful coexistence, with Putin and his regime. For the first time in my life, I can say that we—democratically-minded persons with a liberal sensibility—have a truly dangerous enemy in power in a truly powerful state.
If one seeks further insight into Mr. Putin’s Weltanschauung, take ten minutes to listen to this 2016 BBC interview with Aleksandr Dugin, who has been called “Putin’s favorite philosopher” and even “Putin’s brain.” If one is not familiar with Dugin—and one really should be, as he’s a pretty important and influential intellectual and thinker, and not just in Russia (Eric Zemmour and Stephen Bannon are certainly fans)—here are a few articles and papers from the websites of Stanford University’s The Europe Center, the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center, The Conversation, and The Jewish Chronicle. Pure unadulterated fascism.
If you have an hour to spare and want to be both informed and entertained, watch the 2019 debate between Dugin and Bernard-Henri Lévy. Talk about a clash of diametrically opposed world-views. Never have I had such warm sentiments for BHL.
Must-listen podcast discussions from the past week: Timothy Snyder, Masha Gessen, and Fiona Hill, all with Ezra Klein; and Stephen Kotkin with David Remnick. Also, from a couple of weeks ago, the conversation with Yuval Noah Harari, Timothy Snyder, and Anne Applebaum. You will learn things listening to any one of these.
For those out there who are still flogging the dead horse of NATO expansion—of insisting that this was at the origin of Putin’s action—political scientists Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel (of McGill and Tufts, respectively) drive the nail into the coffin with a piece cross-posted in Just Security and Slate, “Putin’s war was never actually about NATO expansion.” One notes that the leading insister of the NATO canard, the overrated John Mearsheimer, is doubling down, as is his wont, on his insistence, witnessed by his guest essay in The Economist, which is but an updated version of his now famous 2015 lecture on the subject, which has been watched by millions (I was personally unimpressed). Much more interesting than anything the U of Chicago IR realist has to say is Adam Tooze’s piece in the New Statesman, “John Mearsheimer and the dark origins of realism.”
Those of the Mearsheimer bent—plus many who are not—are advocating formal neutrality for Ukraine, akin to that of Finland during the Cold War. On what “Finlandization” actually meant for the Finns was the subject of a full-page tribune in Le Monde dated March 7th by the Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen, “‘Pour la Russie, l’idéal serait de finlandiser toute l’Europe, et pas seulement l’Ukraine’” (For Russia, the ideal would be to Finlandize all of Europe, not just Ukraine). Here’s the beginning (in English via Google Translate—the French version itself being a translation from Finnish—and edited by me):
In the 1970s, when Swedish television broadcast One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, based on the novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1962), Finland cut off the transmitters in the Aland archipelago so that citizens could not watch this film, which was forbidden in our country. Indeed, our cinematographic committee had refused the authorization visa to this drama which spoke of the penal camps of the USSR. Reason: “anti-Sovietism”.
The Gulag Archipelago [published in 1973] was to suffer the same fate. The president and the prime minister opposed its publication, and the Finnish publishing house of the Nobel laureate obediently acquiesced. To circumvent censorship, the first part of the text was published in Sweden. Distribution was not easy in Finland, where the book was banned from libraries and bookstores.
A few years later, my Estonian mother arrived in Finland by marriage and I was born in a country which had retained its independence, but where “Finlandization” exercised its influence everywhere. This concept invented in West Germany means submission to the will of the powerful neighbor, Finland being then the only Western country held so severely in the iron fist of the USSR.
The influence concerned not only foreign policy but also defense, the economy, the media, art and science. It was undesirable for academic research to poke its nose into a Soviet economy in a catastrophic state, and it was best to avoid topics considered anti-Soviet so as not to jeopardize career prospects. When the customs directorate found that Soviet tuna contained three times more mercury than the authorized limit, it was decided that the rapporteur had interpreted the value “too theoretically”. Similarly, the maritime affairs directorate changed its regulations when the Teboil company, owned by the USSR, put on sale boats that did not pass safety tests.
Our textbooks made us believe that Estonia had joined the happy Soviet family of its own free will, because the educational system followed the historiographical line of the USSR. All of this was based on the Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance signed in 1948 between the Soviet Union and Finland, and our education directorate was no exception. While the problems affecting the United States had their place in geography books, no negative adjective was ever associated with the Soviet Union.
But it was in the cultural sector that the USSR received unconditional praise. The armistice of 1944 guaranteeing the free activity of the communists, their ideology had no difficulty in spreading in the artistic and educational spheres. Actors who did not sing in unison with the communist line did not land roles.
In Estonia, all this is difficult to imagine: there, under the Soviet occupation, citizens had no choice but to live under dictatorial laws. Finland, on the other hand, was an independent western democracy where leaders were freely elected. Moreover, Finlandization did not need laws: activities contrary to the ambient climate were stifled spontaneously, without any censorship or sanction on the part of the authorities. (…)
If neutrality for Ukraine means this, it won’t fly. Not a chance if Ukraine remains a sovereign state.
The March 2022 issue of Esprit has an excellent article by Jean-François Bouthors, “La vraie nature de l’humiliation russe.” It begins (again, via Google Translate, with a little more editing):
Since the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops, all commentaries are in agreement in condemning Vladimir Putin. But an unfortunate refrain persists, which is that of the humiliation of Russia by the West and of NATO provocations against it. It is continually repeated by those who had already opposed the sanctions imposed on Russia after the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the secessionist rebellion in the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk; and we can see today how insufficient these sanctions were. This rhetoric of humiliation is not only repeated today by the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen and Thierry Mariani, by Éric Zemmour, who saw Putin as a true political genius, as by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, but it has also been for the past eight years by a part of the French political class, including Philippe de Villiers, François Fillon – who cashed in on it, as it were, by working for big Russian hydrocarbon companies until the war triggered by Putin rendered his position untenable – and, last but not least, Hubert Védrine, who has nonetheless been well-placed to know the veritable situation.
That the Russians have experienced geopolitical and national trauma is obvious. While they were convinced of being the geopolitical equal of the United States, they started to witness the loss of the satellite countries of Central Europe, beginning with the birth of the first free trade union in the entire Eastern bloc, Solidarność, in August 1980. The attempt to quash this peaceful uprising of the Polish population by the imposition of martial law by General Jaruzelski in December 1981 quickly showed its limits. There was no longer any question of Moscow crushing the aspiration of the Poles to regain control of their destiny, as it had done in Budapest in 1956 and in Prague in 1968.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to initiate reforms (perestroika), of which the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 had just shown the dramatic necessity – something that the highest Soviet authorities had been aware of since 1983, by the report by sociologist Tatiana Zaslavskaïa commissioned by Yuri Andropov, when the latter was the boss of the KGB – created a domino effect. While in Russia, an “independent” press opened sensitive files and, in the streets and even on television, people began to speak freely, encouraged by the policy of glasnost, the Central European regimes wavered. A roundtable organized in Poland with the dissident opposition led to the holding of elections, which, while not entirely democratic, could not prevent an electoral landslide and the constitution of a government dominated by activists of Solidarność. In the aftermath, Hungary opened a breach in the Iron Curtain, which was to destabilize the hardline East German regime of Erich Honecker, from which his compatriots fled en masse until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Czechoslovakia fell, then Romania, and so on.
Mikhail Gorbachev and a part of the KGB were not for nothing in this unraveling: for the Soviet leader, it was a matter of weakening the political opposition to his reforms. But his manifest weakness simultaneously nourished other desires, even other appetites. In the Soviet Republics there were hints of autonomy and even independence in the Baltic countries, in Georgia, in Ukraine, in the Caucasus, in Moldova… A painful past came to the fore and sought freedom from the tutelage of Moscow, i.e. from the tutelary authority that was held, in practice, essentially by Russians. In Russia itself, through the figure of Boris Yeltsin, there also arose an aspiration to not simply be Soviets, but to rediscover an older identity. The result was the Belovej agreement (Treaty of Minsk), after the failure of the putsch of August 1991, an agreement concluded on December 8, 1991, between the presidents of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian republics: Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislaw Shuchkievich proclaimed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and effectively deposed Mikhail Gorbachev.
In eleven years, the Soviet empire had come apart. It was sinking on its own. The power of the “great Soviet nation”, whose propaganda had never ceased to sing its glories until the end of the 1980s, was reduced to nothing. No shot had been fired, except by Soviet soldiers against Soviet citizens in Republics which had expressed an aspiration to independence… Westerners had almost nothing to do with it and, to tell the truth, they could hardly believe their eyes. They themselves were destabilized by the immediate consequences, as we saw with François Mitterrand regarding the reunification of Germany. (…)
If Russia has felt humiliated as a nation over the past three decades, she only has to look in the mirror.
There have been a number of reports on how Russians are being informed—or, rather, disinformed—by their media (see in particular the podcast with Masha Gessen on this). And then there’s Russian propaganda aimed at foreigners. À propos, the NYT has a report dated March 12th, “What it was like to work for Russian state television: Until RT America ended abruptly, life as a journalist there was ‘actually so normal.'” As it happens, the deputy editor in chief of RT, who is cited in the piece, was a student of mine in 2003, during her semester abroad in Paris (she was a sophomore at George Washington University, majoring in international affairs and economics). She’s bicultural Russian-American—born in Moscow, emigrated to the US at a young age with one of her parents—and was a delightful young woman and very smart (she got an A in the course). We liked one another (her professor evaluation of me was stellar, which I know), reconnecting several years later on Facebook, exchanging comments and friendly, if sometimes contradictory, messages there and on AWAV (as she was in Moscow and at RT). She accepted criticism of Russia but then at one point, in 2014, got very upset at one of my more virulent anti-Russian AWAV posts and the communication ceased. I regretted that but it was probably inevitable. One thing I remember her saying in 2003 was that she thought that democracy and capitalism were great for America but not for Russia, as they weren’t compatible with the Russian mentality. I note that she maintains her fine (apolitical) WordPress blog, Home & Away, which may be found toward the end of the blogroll. Great pics of Moscow.
À suivre.
UPDATE: Michael Walker and Aaron Bastani of the left-leaning Novara Media YouTube channel have a useful 30-minute explainer (March 13) on “The Azov Battalion & Ukraine’s Far Right.” On the general subject, do read Cathy Young in The Bulwark (February 18), “Smear and loathing: A close look at accusations of Ukrainian anti-Semitism.”
Ioffe: Every time I’m asked by Americans do Russians really believe this stuff… as if we don’t have the same thing happening here. You have 40% of the American population that was convinced in just one year that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election… pic.twitter.com/xZfXd0YMPo
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 17, 2022