Is Putin stoking anti-Americanism for domestic
political purposes?
Posted on 03/07/2005 3:41:43 AM PST by Lukasz
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, who is one of President Vladimir Putin's closest confidants and is regularly mentioned as a possible successor to Putin in 2008, made some uncharacteristic political statements in a 1 March interview with "Moskovskii komsomolets." "Only democrats, with their split personalities, could believe that we might get help from abroad," Ivanov said. "Nobody will help us except ourselves. Therefore we should be powerful and capable of guaranteeing our national security in any situation."'
He also criticized Russian liberals for viewing Russia only as "a money-making enterprise." Recent Russian media reports indicate that the Kremlin has ordered acceptable candidates to succeed Putin to increase their visibility and predict that figures such Ivanov, Federation Council Chairman Sergei Mironov, Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, and Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu will be making more pronouncements of this sort in the future. And the platform they seem to be developing is clearly anti-American.
Even as Putin was shaking hands with U.S. President George W. Bush in Bratislava on 24 February and emphasizing the myriad shared interests of Russia and the United States, a surprising wave of seemingly Kremlin-inspired anti-Americanism was sweeping through Russian domestic politics. Commentators, officials, and others began speaking in chorus about purported U.S. designs to install a pro-Western leader in Moscow, accusations that were buttressed by charges that the CIA had already done as much in Tbilisi and Kyiv.
When former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov appeared at a 25 February press conference with harsh criticism of the Putin administration's policies -- accusing Putin of abandoning the path of democratic development -- Putin supporters latched onto Kasyanov's admission that he had recently held talks with unnamed officials in Washington. Federation Council Chairman Mironov told TV-Tsentr on 28 February that Kasyanov has no chance of winning because he is "a pro-American candidate."
Political consultant Gleb Pavlovskii told RFE/RL on 1 March: "[Kasyanov] should tell by name who it was who endorsed his views. Let the electorate listen and decide whether they want Senator [John] McCain [Republican, Arizona] approving the views of a candidate for president of the Russian Federation." State-controlled television broadcast numerous variations on this theme, leading "Kommersant-Daily" television critic Arina Borodina to conclude to RFE/RL on 1 March that "of course there was a campaign" to discredit Kasyanov.
In his TV-Tsentr comments, Mironov went even further, saying a candidate "endorsed by Washington does not have the slightest chance of becoming president of today's Russia." He seemed to be indicating that anti-American and anti-Western sentiments are rampant among the Russian electorate.
At the same time, the pro-Kremlin youth movement Walking Together has been transforming itself in recent weeks into a new national organization called Nashi (Ours) that has an overtly anti-American ideology. The architect of the new initiative is deputy presidential administration head Vladislav Surkov, who oversees domestic politics for the Kremlin. Surkov is a staunch anti-Westerner who in a major interview with "Komsomolskaya pravda" in September said that decision-makers in the United States and Europe "are living on the phobias of the Cold War and see Russia as a potential enemy." "They take credit for the nearly bloodless collapse of the Soviet Union and want to further that achievement." He added that these external enemies are working in Russia through a "fifth column" of "pseudo-liberals and Nazis" who share "a common hatred of 'Putin's Russia,' as they call it, and common foreign backers." He specifically said that the 2008 presidential election will be a key moment in the fight against these enemies (see "RFE/RL Political Weekly," 13 October 2004).
The events surrounding the Ukrainian presidential election have definitely given impetus to this thinking in the Kremlin, although the general trend was already in place. Walking Together organizer Vasilii Yakemenko has been touring the country for the last few months, agitating among students in the regions to organize local chapters of Nashi. According to "Moskvoskii komsomolets" on 24 February, Yakemenko told a group in Kursk that "previously [Ukraine] was a Russian colony and now it is an American colony." He added that the United States now intends to make Russia its "colony."
Russia's only major nonstate television network, REN-TV, on 2 March interviewed a number of Nashi activists in Nizhnii Novgorod and found them echoing the ideology of Surkov's interview. "We think that America is Russia's main enemy," student Dmitrii Shvabinskii said. "One must remember that we always have had enemies." Fellow student Dmitrii Lyashchev said the goal of the movement "is to stop Russia from becoming a subsidiary of the United States and a supplier of raw materials."
Several of the Nashi activists interviewed by REN-TV highlighted their selfless devotion to their new ideology, emphasizing that Russia's enemies are only interested in profit and personal gain. "Some people don't think about their country," music student Maria Bystrova said. "They only think how to eat well. Such people can sell all the secrets they know." Fellow student Kseniya Baburkina added "we must work for the idea, not for money."
ORT political commentator Mikhail Leontev, who is notorious for his ant-American pronouncements on the main state television network, wrote a 2 March commentary in "Nezavisimaya gazeta" that summed up the new anti-Americanism. "The United States is not our reliable ally in any area in which it declares itself one, and has never been our ally," Leontev wrote. He added that, as it did in Ukraine, U.S. politicians intend to finance "subversive organizations" because "they dislike the political system existing in Russia." "It is no secret that so-called nongovernmental organizations are now openly financed not only by foundations and suspicious private individuals with very peculiar political views," Leontev wrote. "They are also directly financed by the U.S. Congress."
Most analysts agree that the Kremlin was genuinely shaken by the events in Ukraine and the administration fears that such a scenario could occur -- or be provoked -- in Russia. The Kremlin's preemptive measures -- including the creation of Nashi; the discrediting of Kasyanov; the creation of controlled leftist and, possibly, rightist political movements to "compete" with Unified Russia; and others -- are indications that the Putin administration is sparing no effort to make sure that the 2007 Duma elections and the 2008 presidential race are managed to its liking. And that there is no need for the kind of crude falsification that stoked the unrest in Ukraine.
At the same time, the Kremlin clearly appreciates the realpolitik orientation of the Bush administration, something that Russian commentators emphasized during the 2004 U.S. presidential race. The Putin administration clearly believes that Bush values stability in Russia more than democratic development and that Putin can only improve his international stature by appearing to be the most reliable bulwark against a seething tide of anti-Western sentiment among the Russian public. If the West accepts this notion, Kremlin analysts might well be thinking, it will ease up on criticism of Russian domestic policies -- including Chechnya, the curtailing of media freedoms, and the elimination of real political competition -- and not use economic levers such as membership in the World Trade Organization to influence Russia's domestic affairs.
By encouraging the broad perception that the events in Ukraine were nothing but a CIA-sponsored coup d'etat, the Kremlin hopes to transform its humiliating setback in Kyiv into tangible domestic and international gains.
Is Putin stoking anti-Americanism for domestic
political purposes?
More optimism my friend, Rome wasn’t built in one day.
I know, I know, I know; and of course it took America more than 90 years to gradually evolve into a true (or at least less false) democracy--the history of the New England profiteers, the land agents in the eastern Middle West, make present-day Ukrainians seem scrupulously law-abiding.
The more I read about it, the more it seems to me Poland is in an enviable position, historically, sitting in between two crumbling empires, Russia and Old Europe.
If Poland can keep its head, and play its cards correctly, it is possible Poland can emerge (not tomorrow, not next week, not next year, but some time in the future) as the greatest power on continental Europe, as it had been during the Middle Ages.
I got no problem with Poland ultimately absorbing Moscow, Berlin, Brussels, and Paris, although such a situation would take 50, 75, 100 years to evolve. They had theirs, and now it's time for you guys to get yours.
It's the attitude prevalent in the American "Old West," sir; you know, all those cowboy movies starring John Wayne, Ward Bond, and James Arness.
"Okay, these guys have run things around here long enough, and they've run things into the ground--and so now it's time to let these other guys over here run things....."
I don't expect Poland to become a great power in my own lifetime, of course, but I do expect to see, in my own lifetime (a) the European "Union" being bothered, pestered, picked apart, shattered, by its eastern members who resent Paris, Brussels, and Berlin as much as they resented Moscow, and (b) the emergence of yet another "New World Order," whose nature I cannot foresee; only God can.
But it's going to be great fun and amusement the next ten years--a ten-year non-stop television comedy--watching you guys cause the Old Men in Old Europe the dithers.
The love affair, with a brief interruption during the 1810s, between the perfidious Gauls and Moscow is hundreds of years old, and one hardly expects it to change.
However, Moscow and Paris are now two wizen, wrinkled old men for whom even half a ton of Viagra could not re-animate.
And the Germans of course have always been the destroyers, the wreckers, of people and cultures in Europe. I say this with a straight face--I have no sympathy for the Germans.
This is a poker-game going on here, sir, and I have no doubt that no matter which playing-cards are dealt the young men of Young Europe, they can outwit the decayed cerebral capacities of the old men of Old Europe.
I would not trust the Germans more than my nose could smell, sir.
This is a very large house out on the prairies of Nebraska, in which are more than 6,000 books (hardcover, no paperbacks), nearly all of them history and biography.
Yeah, there's about 200 large books with copies of Dutch, Flemish, and northern German painters of the 15th and 16th century, and about 200 more of photographs of railway passenger trains, but the rest of them are history and biography.
Among all those books about Germany, there is not a nice word written; I have looked for books complimentary to Germany, and not succeeded. The books that say nice things about Germany are as if written by Soviet propagandists.
Even Julius Caesar, 2100 years ago, noticed there is something sinister about Germany.
This is not to denigrate others of German ancestry now living in other parts of the world, including here in America; geography, climate, terrain, changes people. This pertains only to Germans still in Germany.
Many years ago, I was offered an opportunity to spend nine months in western Germany--I was a student at the University of Nebraska at the time--all my expenses paid by someone else.
I turned down the offer, and instead spent my own money spending the time wandering around France. My "excuse" was that I did not wish to trod on the soil fertilized not by honest sweat and toil, but by the blood of millions of innocents throughout the centuries.
Others thought I was silly--especially since I spent a lot of my own money in France--and I was only 19 years old at the time, but what good are principles, if one does not use them?
During the second world war, there was a "plan" proposed around America, called the "Morgenthau Plan," devised by the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau.
This plan suggested that since Germany was a cancer on the body of Europe, that after the war was won, Germany be shattered into 600 different little tiny principalities, and its populace reduced permanently to medieval, if not Stone Age, standards of living, so as to cure this cancer.
That was a good plan, but unfortunately the exigencies of the Cold War demanded a strong, vibrant, healthy, vigorous western Germany as protection for the west against the Soviet Union, and so the plan was shelved, forgotten.
Thanks for the post. Interesting.
My attitude about Germany was formed when I was 10, 11, years old, and the library got a collection of ancient black-and-white moving-pictures from the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
These were "news-reels," as shown in German theatres 1933-1945.
The one that has haunted me ever since--and it has been a very long time since I was 10, 11, years old--are flickering pictures lasting perhaps three minutes.
A woman with an infant in her arms is being escorted to something (a train, or the "showers," is not seen); the woman is about 30 years old, and is between two German soldiers, about 18-19 years old.
The woman could have been Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Czech, Slovak, Russian; I do not know.
Shortly when the film begins, one of the two German soldiers indicates he would like to carry the infant, because everyone likes infants. He has a smile on his face, and assures the woman.
She hands her infant over to him.
Then the German soldiers begin playfully tossing the infant to-and-fro, between them, as if a game, or something. The mother smiles, the infant laughs and chortles, the two German soldiers beam.
Then suddenly the mother gets nervous, anxious, and asks for her infant back. The German soldiers continue tossing the infant back-and-forth between them; the infant laughs, the two German soldiers smile--but the mother is now begging and pleading, and pulling, to get her infant back.
And then suddenly one of the two German soldiers tosses the infant up into the air, shish-kabobing him with the bayonet, right there in front of the mother.
This was no "Schindler's List," with well-paid actors acting out pain and suffering; these were real people, and the impact was powerful.
Human nature does not change; this was Germany then, this was Germany before then, and this is Germany now, and Germany in the future.
All peoples in all times have committed acts of cruelty and atrocity against others--including we here in America--but no people at no time seem to have committed as many, proportionately, as the Germans throughout their history.
After seeing something like that ancient black-and-white news-reel, I am still asking, a very long time later, how can one possibly justify the existence of Germany?
"He added that the United States now intends to make Russia its "colony." "
Who need it ? Half of Russians is addicted or have AIDS. Anyone sane wouldn't take this crap even for free.
BTW Show us the chart.
What a awful story, I cannot even imagine even that I have seen many documental films about brutality of the nazis during WWII.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.