These days our tweeters and commentators of all stripes are true artists: they have turned the map of Ukraine into a huge blank canvas on which to pour out their deepest obsessions. The blame for the war lies with Russian imperialist ambitions, Russophobic Nazis in the Ukraine, Atlanticist eastern expansionism, US interests or the false promises of the EU: each speaks of the fair as it goes. Reality is so polyhedral that it lends itself to the most diverse interpretations, if not to fiction.
All these interpretations have in common, however, that they move within interpretive frameworks of the 20th century. The fears linked to concepts and slogans that were increasingly difficult to explain to young students return: Cold War, nuclear threat, World War III or the No to NATO, bases out. Putin is either a dangerous Bolshevik or a fascist in search of his habitat and its Sudetenland; Just like a doll, you change her dress and Princess Barbie becomes Adventure Barbie. But she is probably more like a Russian doll: you open it, and inside you find another Putin identical to himself. Because the invasion of Ukraine is not the battle of Stalingrad.
Putin, a son of the Great War
There is no doubt that the president of the Russian Federation, born in the former Soviet Union, is in some way a son of that war, and that he began his career working for the KGB, a fundamental institution of the Cold War. I do not think, however, that in the cellars of the Lubyanka much was said about the collectivization of the means of production or the classless society. His training there would have been more related to the reason of state and a Realpolitik Hobbesian, where the political is understood in terms of “friend-enemy” as advocated by the Nazi theoretician Carl Schmidtt. Also the doctrine of the “enemy within”, with its interrogations, torture and disappearances: the same teachings as in the CIA and the School of the Americas. Up to that point they looked alike then.
More strange it may be that Putin kept his communist card until 1995, while working in the mayor’s office of St. Petersburg under the orders of Anatoli Sobchak, of independent affiliation. With the fall of his mentor, however, Putin moved into Yeltsin’s federal administration, and his career there was as meteoric as the continuing dance of party names: Our Home-Russia, Unity, and finally United Russia (arising from the unification of the parties unity, homeland and All Russia). So that later we can say that he had not been warning us.
Putin’s apparent ideological shift was no exception: seeing Moscow’s central power falter, many members of the Nomenclature of the Party returned like prodigal sons to their homelands, they entrenched themselves there in power like little kinglets of Taifa and when they turned their jacket around it turned out that the lining wore the fervent colors of nationalism and the new flags. An evolution not so surprising, in any case, in a Soviet Union that too soon abandoned that of “proletarians of the world, unite!” (before Flora Tristán than Marx and Engels) and found a better binder in the victory over Nazi Germany as a founding myth than in the October Revolution.
Stalin and the Russian Empire
Such was the debate between Stalin and his defense of the revolution in a single country against the internationalist Trotsky, who predicted that limiting it only to Russia would necessarily have to become, surrounded by enemies, an authoritarian and militaristic country. And we already know how Trotsky ended up, with an ice ax to his head, and how Stalin continued: a Georgian who worked hard to Russify the Union, deporting millions of ethnic minorities (when not ending them, as in the Ukrainian Holodomor), Ingush to Tatars, to massively replace them with Russian population. Because the USSR, formally a federation, has always functioned, perhaps due to historical inertia, as a metempsychosis of the Russian Empire. If for Marx the Russia of the tsars was “a prison of nations”, Stalin turned it into his graveyard.
Russian nationalism goes back a long way.: was born among the elites at the end of the 18th century, dividing these between those who proposed to continue the Western modernizing example and those who claimed, from conservatism and traditionalism, a differentiated and primordialist spirit. After the Decembrist riots of 1825, Baron Uvarov, Minister of Education, established the three legs of Russia’s reason for existence: the Orthodox Church, autocracy and nationalism.
Juan Linz has already warned that transitions to democracy become almost impossible in what he called “sultanistic regimes”, a personal power that works on the benefits of collaborators and the fear of the rest of the citizenry. In the absence of an articulated civil society endowed with a democratic memory, the USSR did not fall due to external hostilities or internal opposition, but rather dismantled itself as a victim of these centrifugal forces.
The Russian revolution did not bring democracy, nor did Yeltsin’s kleptocracy, which entrenched itself in authoritarian positions to the point of attacking its own Parliament, with hundreds of victims. And now Putin has no qualms about rehabilitating the memory of the first Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who invented a lineage that linked with the Caesars, or a communist like Stalin who promoted the cult of his personality: his statues proliferate in the Great 21st century Russia.
democracy with adjectives
Surkov, Prime Minister and adviser to the President until just two years ago, coined the concept of “sovereign democracy” for that Russian nation: we already know that putting adjectives to democracy is like “I’m not a racist, but”. In this case, sovereign democracy would consist in the fact that the political life of society, its powers, institutions and actions are at the service of and are directed by the “Russian nation”, a political subject above the citizen and who claims, as if it had no quite (it is the largest country in the world), all territory inhabited by Russians. A sovereign democracy that has already killed more than 300 journalists and opponents.
When the USSR suddenly collapsed to the surprise of almost everyone (it was unilaterally decided by the Soviet presidents of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, legend has it that at dawn, after a few bottles of vodka), the Think tank Americans quickly began to try to unravel the meaning that the new world order could acquire and what the new enemies would be.
We have laughed a lot at Fukuyama’s “end of history” (although what the American political scientist developed in his thesis was the end of the dialectical process of history), and we have criticized endlessly Huntington’s clash of civilizations, which Zapatero tried to convert, without much success, into the Alliance of Civilizations.
De Fukuyama a Huntington
Huntington understood a civilization as a group of countries linked by history, religion, and culture. If in the past the wars had been carried out by kings, then by nations and finally by the conflict between ideologies, he predicted that those of the 21st century would have cultural and identity issues as their first cause.
Beyond the arbitrariness of its “civilizational” divisions and the erroneousness of many of its forecasts (by undervaluing economic motivations or the fact that, since 1991, the vast majority of conflicts have been of an intracivilizational order), it is worth remembering the lines that he dedicated to Ukraine: a country divided between Western and Orthodox civilization, he already recognized it as one of the fracture lines in which the greatest conflicts could emerge.
Russia itself has been civilizingly oscillating, between moments of rapprochement with the West and nationalist withdrawal. A civilization implies a system of its own values, where ideas such as democracy, freedom and equality or human rights do not have to have a greater power of attraction than those of respect for tradition and authority, or the profession of faith religious.
Hypercapitalism did not bring democracy to China, and it has not brought it to Russia either. Confronted with Western liberalism, its human rights and its individualism, controversial ideologues close to the Kremlin such as Aleksandr Duguin demand a strong State, order and family, positive values, the reinforcement of religion and the Church in society, patriotic media that express national interests. If Putin intends to denazify Ukraine, perhaps he should start with the neo-Nazi groups that roam freely in the new Russia.
Past and future
Vladimir Putin presented this war on February 24 as “a question of life and death, a question of our historical future as a people.” What of the “historic future” is one of the most unsettling oxymorons I have come across lately, but it reminds me that it is also the strange and fascinating feeling I got from my trip to Moscow a few years ago: a great city, full of history, contrasts and crazy people ( a bit like Jerusalem).
On one side of the magnificent State Library still known by the proud name of Leniniana and presided over by a statue of Dostoyevsky (the third largest library in the world), there was a luxurious fashion store in a building whose façade is still presided over by the sickle and the hammer. In the window, a tracksuit: a tacky tracksuit in gold sequins, with the inscription CCCP embroidered on the front and, even larger, occupying the entire back. I did the calculation and, in exchange, the tracksuit cost about 2,000 euros. The Soviet Union reduced to that, a very expensive pop icon, a provocative fetish or for those nostalgic for past glories.
On the other side of the window, the same as always: the servants of the gleba, old women bent over with a gray duster and a headscarf, marked by the resignation of centuries, whose hunger and cold the powers try to mitigate with flag rags ( recipe that history has shown infallible, however inexplicable it may be). “In times of the Soviet Union, a doctor’s or teacher’s salary was enough to buy vodka and sausages, but the stores were empty. Today’s supermarkets are full of varieties and brands, but the salary is no longer enough to buy anything,” he says. one of the testimonies collected by Svetlana Alexievich in her Homo sovieticus. And the West looked the other way, because after all, Putin was a good business partner.
* Professor of the History of Political Thought at the Autonomous University of Madrid. From the Spanish newspaper Publicspecial for Page 12.