Of particular note regarding last month’s Estonian Bronze
Soldier crisis, during which Russian nationalists groups clashing
with police and Russian lawmakers threatening sanctions against the
tiny Baltic nation over the relocation of a Red Army memorial, was
the constant invocation of principles of “anti-fascism” by the
Kremlin-backed groups and their sponsors. Chauvinistic politicians,
sensationalistic state-run broadcasts, and protesters in the
streets of Tallinn and Moscow all made unceasing reference to the
ignis fatuus of Estonian “fascism.” Perplexingly, when the
Russian nationalist protests spun out of control, resulting in the
looting of upscale storefronts and liquor stores, one of the
protesters was stabbed by one of his own only to be lionized by the
Nashi movement chief as a “Russian hero, who died for us, who like
our grandfathers died” in the struggle against fascism.
Likewise, when the Polish national legislature began to consider
a draft bill giving local authorities the discretion to remove
monuments glorifying Communist dictatorship, Konstantin Kosachyov,
the chairman of the Russian State Duma International Affairs
Committee, insisted that Soviet World War II memorials symbolize
“not just defeat, but the common victory of Poland, the Soviet
people and those of the anti-Hitler coalition over the common
enemy, namely the Nazis.” Poles and Estonians, who had their
countries dismembered by the then-allied Nazis and Soviets, and
then endured nearly a half-century of resultant socialist
captivity, would be surprised to hear that theirs was in any wise a
common victory.
But these absurd claims of a Russian struggle against
contemporary fascism are more than just historical myopia and
incoherent bellicism. They are clear indicators of the failure of
Russia after the initial promise following the collapse of the
Soviet Union, and serve as a warning of worse to come. Vladimir
Socor of the Jamestown Foundation has perspicaciously described
these aforementioned appeals to anti-fascism first as “part of
classical Soviet political-warfare techniques (undoubtedly studied
by the KGB alumni who are now in charge of Russia) to singularize a
designated opponent while attacking it, so as to inhibit general
solidarity with that targeted opponent.” What is more, Socor
ominously notes, “by stirring up enmity within Russia against
Estonia over the Bronze Soldier, the Kremlin seeks to immunize the
public against any Russian form of Vergangenheits-Bewaeltigung
(Germany’s post-Nazi comprehension of its history) so as to avoid
internal challenges to the Soviet-successor ruling elite.” More
evidence, in other words, for Pyotr Chaadaev’s famous assertion
that Russia’s universal lesson to the world is that its example is
to be avoided at all costs.
There was, at one time, hope that this distressing state of
affairs would not come to pass. The Russian writer Yevgeny
Yevtushenko, inspired by the promise of perestroika,
insisted in his 1987 poem “Monuments Still Not Built” that “there
can be no rebuilding without rebuilding memory.” As the Soviet
Union crumbled, Yevtushenko was challenging the bureaucracy and
intelligentsia to confront the horrors of the past and prepare for
the future accordingly. For Yevtushenko and other Russian liberals,
the “time of honest marble” had arrived, and, for starters,
monumental socialist propaganda was to be replaced by memorials
dedicated to the victims of Communism. Despite this early optimism,
Yevtushenko’s dream of honest marble was not to be realized; the
efforts of Russia’s Memorial Society have come to nothing, and a
national monument to victims of political persecution has yet to be
erected in Russia. Instead, for the most part any honest marble on
this subject is to be found in the previously captive nations of
Central and Eastern Europe, and now in Washington, D.C., the site
of the newly installed Victims of Communism Memorial.
Yevtushenko’s vision of a historically sensitive, culturally
revitalized, and internationally integrated Russia was clearly a
non-starter. One of the early (and now largely forgotten)
disappointments in post-Soviet Russia’s relations with the West,
and one which eerily prefigured the “anti-fascist” rhetoric of the
Estonian crisis, concerned the dispute over Central and Eastern
European national archives looted by Stalin’s “trophy brigades”
during World War II. After the fall of the Soviet Union, calls for
the restitution of these vitally important archives grew louder,
and as a condition to joining the Council of Europe in 1995, Russia
was obliged to settle all issues related to the return of property
claimed by member states of the Council of Europe (and particularly
with respect to those artworks and documents transferred to Moscow
in 1945). Instead, the Russian parliament produced a piece of
legislation concerning “cultural valuables” that in effect
nationalized the dispersed cultural treasures, thereby barring a
return to their rightful owners. The newspaper Pravda
offered support for the legislation, warning that Russia could be
“robbed again” by claimants. President Yeltsin, fully aware that
the legislation contravened international law, vetoed it, but 141
of 178 Duma representatives overrode the veto after comparing the
law to the battle of Stalingrad and claiming that restitution would
be “spitting on [World War II veterans’] graves.” Central and
Eastern European governments protested, but to no avail. This
legislation was at the time hailed in Russia as one more victory
over “fascist invaders.”
Just as the Taliban’s cultural crime of the destruction of the
Bamiyan Buddhas foreshadowed larger political challenges, so too
did these more or less symbolic Russian failures foretell of
socio-political ones to come. (This is not to suggest, of course,
that the Taliban and the Russian Federation are in any way similar;
rather, that future challenges can be signaled by essentially
symbolic political gestures.) Owing in no small part to Russia’s
inability to rebuild the memory of its totalitarian past, Russian
“sovereign democracy” is now anything but democratic, as evidenced
by the Kremlin’s ongoing centralization of power, the
muscle-flexing of the special services, the marginalization of
opposition parties, the erosion of federal principles, the rampant
gangsterism, the state’s stranglehold on the press, crackdowns
against human rights organizations, the Litvinenko affair, and so
on. It is no wonder that (pace Vladimir Putin’s shameless
claim that he is the world’s only “absolute, pure democrat”) the
Russian word demokratiya is often intentionally
mispronounced as dermokratiya, a scatological pun.
This status quo is not merely a concern for free-thinking
Russians, however. “Having done away with the domestic opposition,”
the Russian journalist and asylum-seeker Yelena Tregubova has
written, “Putin…has now decided to deal with
the external ‘enemies.’” What Europe and the United States now face
is a revanchist Russian Federation, dysfunctional but flush with
petro-dollars, that currently exhibits a volatile admixture of
neo-czarist imperial ambition and Soviet-era rhetoric and
tactics.
Russian revanchism in recent decades has traditionally been
directed towards countries of the so-called blizhnee
zarubezhe, or near-abroad, like Azerbaijan (as seen in 1990’s
“Black January”), Georgia (with Russian interference in the
breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia), Moldova (with
the Kremlin-backed Transnistrian Republic) and throughout Central
Asia (evidenced by Russia’s “special relations” with co-ethnic
communities therein). Now, to again quote Vladimir Socor, Estonia
has been targeted in “the first serious attempt to reverse the
post-1991 status quo in Europe,” and subsequent Russian
saber-rattling over the placement of missile defense sites in
Poland and the Czech Republic represents another, more concrete,
example of the Kremlin’s goal of reasserting its erstwhile
authority in Central and Eastern Europe by exerting influence over
the defense policies of two sovereign, democratic nations (members
of NATO and the EU, no less). A symbolic challenge has again
preceded a concrete one.
It is a historical truth that Russia seeks its own stability
through the instability of its neighbors; the security afforded by
European missile defense systems against rogue regimes is thus not
in Moscow’s interests. Equally important to Kremlin policymakers,
however, is the symbolic reassertion of Russia’s geopolitical
throw-weight in Central and Eastern Europe. The United States,
NATO, the EU, and its constituent states can no longer rely on
“frank discussions” with Vladimir Putin at international summits
like the recent Munich Conference on Security Policy or the G-8
summit in Heiligendamm to safeguard Europe from Russian revanchism
(whether in the energy sphere, or as seen in the recent attempted
abrogation of Eastern European national sovereignty). Instead,
Western policymakers should be mindful of the words of Alfred
Mercier, the 19th-century French polemicist, who wrote in 1863 that
“as long as Europe remains what it is today, that is, strong and
disciplined, [Russian] cannons will knock at its doors in vain.” A
strong and disciplined Europe would not tolerate Russia’s
irrational “anti-fascist” rhetoric, nor would it overlook the
Kremlin’s repeated attempts to diminish the sovereignty of its
western neighbors. A strong and disciplined West would follow
through with the Central European missile defense program,
entertain Polish recommendations for an “energy NATO,” and take
other appropriate affirmative steps to bring Russia into line with
other rational, dependable actors in the world system.
Time will tell whether Europe and the United States will take
the proactive steps Mercier foretold as necessary to deal with the
Russian challenge. By examining Russian rhetoric and Russian
actions over the last month within the context of the longue
durée, however, it is clear that we have been
served sufficient warning of the destabilizing effects of Russian
revanchism. With the evident failure of the poet Yevtushenko’s
vision of a reformed, liberalized Russia, the West must now adjust
its own Russian policy accordingly. Only then will it be clear that
we have learned the lessons so eloquently embodied in the Victims
of Communism Memorial, lessons that recent “anti-fascist”
demagoguery indicates have gone unlearnt by those in power in
Russia.
