On Russia's Global Importance

 Over the last 30 years, Western officialdom's policies concerning Russia have grown increasingly irrational. Europeans tend to forget that long before the US or the Ukraine ever existed, Russia was always there in their hour of need. Unfortunately, after the latest events, Russia might not be there for us any longer.

For me as an historian, the only Slavic state that deserves all the respect and consideration of social scientists is the Russian state.

Unfortunately, the European Slavs proved an absolutely incredible inability to create solid states that would last over time and prosper. Neither the Serbs, nor the Czechs, nor the Slovaks or even the Poles have proved to Europe or the world that they have the attributes necessary to live in peace with each other, to build well-organized or consolidated state structures (see Ukraine).

To be sure, the Poles disappeared for 200 years from modern history, reappearing as a state only since 1918. Federal Yugoslavia disappeared after only 70 years, Czechoslovakia around the same time. Most of the time, these branches of the Slavic people became the victims of their stronger neighbours - Turks, Germans, Russians or Austrians - because of this inability to build solid state structures.

Please compare the European Slavs now with the Russians, who have a millenary history of existence as a state, although their central position in Eurasia is an extremely difficult one geopolitically. During the Middle Ages, they managed to defeat both the Mongol invaders and the Tartars, not to mention the Turks. In modern times, they colonized Siberia as far as the Pacific and came to expand their territories in the west to the borders of Romania or Poland. All this time, Russia has overall been a factor of stability in Europe, being a reliable ally of both the Germans and the Western powers - England and France, but also the United States - in the first half of the twentieth century.

Nowadays most of the European Slavs have joined the NATO umbrella and are barking like puppies at the big dog, Russia, which has done nothing to antagonize them in recent decades, on the contrary. The Russians have instead been busy rebuilding their economy and developing their agriculture. From an importer of wheat during communism - according to Gorbachev they used to purchase it with gold bullion at one point - they became one of the biggest exporters of grain.

Russia has always been run by the secret services, whether we are talking about Tsarist Ohrana, the Soviet KGB or now the FSB. This is one of the secrets of the Russian state's longevity and stability, since the Russians are not at all convinced that professional politicians or Western-type democracy could ensure their survival as a state. They were willing to give it a go during the nineties, but the experiment failed miserably and was never going to be repeated.

Of course, the West would prefer Russia to be run by an alcoholic like Yeltsin or someone like that. But the Russians - who have recovered economically from the disaster of the 1990s under Vladimir Putin, have paid off their outstanding debts, rebuilt their army and amassed important financial reserves for the first time in their recent history - have other options. In fact, this is the fundamental reason why Putin is not liked by leaders in the West, the rest is just propaganda.

In terms of international relations, Russia cannot agree to a unipolar world  ruled exclusively by Washington, just as China does not agree. The Russians' preference for a multi-polar world, in which they have a say, is hundreds of years old. They were the ones who put an end to the French hegemonic plans in 1814, they were also instrumental in the fight against German hegemony that caused two world wars last century. 

Russia had peacefully and voluntarily given up, without armed conflict, the bi-polar world that appeared after 1945, but it cannot agree not to participate at all in global decision-making. This approach is an extremely dangerous neoconservative utopia, which could trigger World War III, even a nuclear one. Unfortunately, since the inhabitants of the Anglosphere  are not Russians, I don't think they will peacefully give up their plans for a unipolar world that the American neoconservatives have been trying to impose globally for 25 years now ...

Epilogue to the End of the USSR

The events unfolding in Ukraine are the final act in the disintegration of the Soviet Union which began peacefully, Czech-style, in 1991 and is unfortunately about to end in bloodshed, Yugoslavian-style, now. This time, however, the part played by Milosevic in Belgrade is being emulated by Zelensky in Kiev with the West backing the wrong side in this conflict.

Astute and knowledgeable observers of European affairs may have noticed for a few decades now that European Slavs do not always know how to live peacefully together in the same country.

During the nineties we witnessed the implosion of two Slav states, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The differences between Czechs and Slovaks or between Croatians and Serbs were in fact minor and were related to different dialects, in some cases to religion or belonging to different political blocks before unification. To give but one example, while Serbs were until the end of the 19th century part of the Ottoman empire, the Croatians lived in the Austro-Hungarian empire. (In 2006, even Serbia and Montenegro dissolved their union dating back to the 19th century)

The disintegration of Yugoslavia took a full 8 years to complete, between 1991-1999, and was marked by wars between the Serbs and the Croats, the Serbs and the Bosniaks, the Serbs and the Kossovars. The wars ended only after NATO took the decision to bomb Serbia and destroy critical infrastructure in 1999.

For most European nations of mixed ethnic backgrounds, like Belgium or Switzerland, such differences did not prevent them from building well-managed states, which outlasted cataclysmic events like the two world wars, and are still around today. Belgium, for example, separated in 1830 from the more powerful Dutch state and was subject to military aggression. The military aggression against Belgium was stopped in its tracks by the London Conference of the Great Powers, when its independence and neutrality were affirmed and recognised.

To the East of the continent, Romania provides another example of a country made up of territories of the former Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, but which displays remarkable national unity and a high degree of tolerance towards the Hungarian minority on its territory. 

In the beginning, the 1991  dissolution of the USSR happened peacefully . The Soviet empire stands as a shining example of a multinational state that folded without igniting a war or provoking ethnic violence. This situation lasted until 2014, when American neoconservatives decided to play nation-builders in Ukraine. 

The 2014 change in government in Kiev and Russia's subsequent annexation of Crimea marked the beginning of an armed struggle between the Russophones living in the Donbas and the Ukrainian army. After another 8 years of skirmishes which made 14,000 victims, as documented by the OSCE, Russia has decided to intervene militarily a few days ago and to start the aerial bombing of the main Kiev military installations. Unlike the mighty NATO intervention in Serbia in 1999 - which shied away from putting boots on the ground - the Russian army entered Ukraine in force. Also, whilst NATO's actions in Serbia were questionable from an international law point of view, Russia is trying to put order in its own neighbourhood.

The events unfolding over the past few days in Ukraine and Russia's military intervention  are, unfortunately, badly distorted by Western media and diplomats. The most disgusting aspect of the current events is the Western leadership's hypocritical reaction to them. Thus, while the West deplored the fate of a few hundred Kosovar victims and was quick enough to bomb the Milosevic regime out of existence, the thousands of victims and millions of refugees from the Donbas have not registered at all on its radars. In fact, the condemnation of the Russian intervention has a lot to do with the West's irrational and unjustifiable dislike of Russia as a state and of Putin as its leader.

What we are in fact witnessing now is the epilogue of the USSR's 1991 disintegration, which left Russian-speaking populations in countries like Georgia or Ukraine at the mercy of unscrupulous political leaders, like Shakashvili or Zelensky, and their external backers, especially in the US. Both these leaders have done their utmost to drag the entire Western alliance into a much bigger military conflict with Russia, in an eerily similar manner in which the Serbs had done in 1914. If ultimately successful, such efforts would have surely degenerated into a nuclear war.

Treating the current events in Ukraine as similar to the final disintegration of Yugoslavia, however, can go a long way towards preventing Western officials from making fools of themselves out of sheer lack of understanding of the political culture of Slavic nations and of their propensity to use violence against other Slavs who happen not to share their religion or language, as Kiev's treatment of the Russophones in the Donbas has shown.