Ivan, the Infamous Red Army, Returns After a Little R & R

Wars are in a disgracefully trivial sense like movies. A lot of bad ones like to re-present themselves in sequels. The sequels are almost always worse than the originals. The same can be said for musicians, who defy every industry expert, every person with a logical brain for that matter, and make a no holds barred comeback. Dmitry Medvedev and his puppet master, Vladimir Putin, probably weren’t listening to the Backstreet Boys last Friday, but the same principal applied. Russia is back, like all countries with malevolent designs, she has unfinished business: a quest for security. As it was for Stalin, and as it was for Ivan the Terrible, so it is for Putin and Medvedev, security for Russia means insecurity for everyone else.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia over the past few days is deeply symbolic of Russia’s re-emergence on the world stage. It was hardly a spur of the moment attack, but rather the culmination of a long period of hatred and provocation. Russia has been in retreat since 1989. The first thing to disappear was its claim on global power and the consonant fantasy that Soviet Communism was ‘the wave of the future.’ Few people still believed this by 1989; indeed many Communists had long since been looking to China, both as a paradigm of economic advancement and as a prototype for smashing dissent. However, the year the wall came tumbling down was the final nail in the coffin for Soviet expansionism, and each of its little puppet regimes fell victim to popular calls for change, and the indomitable human yearning for freedom. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself was a poorly written chapter in human history. Those were the good old days.

Not so anymore. Russia has been aggrieved for a long time now, probably since before 1989, but the Kremlin has had to grin and bear it. This is an uncomfortable disposition for the leaders of Red Square. Firstly, grinning only comes naturally in the Kremlin when someone else is suffering. Secondly, bearing it is hard a state of being for leaders who feel their neighbours are divinely designed to be its vassal states. So having taken a crash course in capitalism and democracy under Boris Yeltsin that was doomed to failure, the Kremlin endured as is its former fiefdoms, one by one, chose democracy, NATO, and for the most of them, the EU.
Russia was not in a position to retaliate. It was naturally bruised having undergone a humiliating collapse- imagine having the wave the history behind you one day, and being history the next. Moreover, its economy in 1992 was roughly on a par with the Netherlands. The great bear of the east was doomed to lie there, wounded in a snare, bleeding on the periphery.

Putin, on the other hand, performed a volte-face. By re-centralising control of Russia’s mammoth energy industry he wrested power out of the hands of the oligarchs, bestowing favour on those who were disposed to him, while arresting or exiling those who criticised him. He virtually abolished local democracy making governorships political appointees. It was standard fare. Curtailing freedom of press and expression came naturally. However, more ominously, Putin gave succour to an array of jingoistic militias who roam the streets of Moscow routinely harassing opponents and foreigners. This provides a snapshot of how the Kremlin uses nationalism as a tool in its game. Anti-Western rhetoric and taking stances such as that taken on Kosovo all serve the same purpose, fanning nationalist sentiment and tightening society.

The Kremlin has been ready to act for a while now but, once again as it was in the 1940s, that office is, as George Kennan famously observed in 1946, utterly responsive to the logic of force. The final straw probably came when Ukraine underwent the Orange Revolution and adopted a pro-Western posture. Its leaders uttered dreams of NATO and EU membership. Russia responded by fomenting unrest in Eastern Ukraine and in Crimea (where support for the government in Kiev is cool) and then by famously cutting off gas supplies to freezing Ukrainians in the dead of winter, after they failed to pay an exorbitant price hike. The main conclusion Russia drew from its schoolyard bullying was not that it was physically able to steal the new kid’s lunch, but rather that the prefects were too busy trying to tame the attractive girls who were smoking. Next Russia flexed its muscles a tad more, this time focusing on an actual EU member. It unleashed a cyber-war on Estonia, yet the rest of the EU seemed to care little, least of all countries like Germany who were keeping warm off Russian gas. Thus the bully learned a new lesson; robbing one of the prefects is fine, so long as a couple of the other prefects receive a share of the loot.

And so the bear turned south, only to find a former Soviet Republic crooning to a distinctly different tune. Waves of protest in 2003 lead to the resignation of Eduard Shevardnadze, Mikhail Gorbachev’s foreign minister who had run Georgia in subservience to Moscow, and saw American educated Mikheil Saakashvili thrust into power with a democratic mandate. Saakashvili was determined to heed the calls of his countrymen and so Georgia radically realigned itself in favour of the West. Troops were put on the ground in Iraq (up to last week Georgia had the third highest contingent of troops there), while NATO membership was openly discussed, and lest anyone doubt Georgia’s pro-Western commitment the Tbilisi airport road was renamed in honour of, the one and only, George W. Bush.

It is said that Putin’s dislike for Saakashvili goes far beyond the borders of policy, and is in fact a deep personal enmity. That only adds fuel to a fire already ablaze. Over the last few days Russia has signalled that it is ready to re-erect its historic sphere of influence. The Kremlin is tired of pro-Western upstarts on its borders. However, the recent crisis has more alarming features than previous ones. The most obvious is the use of brute force. Nevertheless, also deeply disturbing are the parallels with Nazi Germany. The pretext for Russia’s invasion of Georgia was the abuse of Russian people in rebel territories within the Caucasian state. One suspects few people were moved by the expressions of Pan-Slavic sympathy. Not only is it possible that Russia only conferred citizenship on these people so that it could lure Georgia into a trap, the sheer mendacity of the claims were themselves disproven when the Russian army moved beyond the borders of South Ossetia, into Georgia proper, taking cities on the way, bombing Tbilisi airport, and opening up a second front. The Georgian army is retreating, Saakashvili is calling for a ceasefire, yet Ivan keeps on marching, and just today Stalin’s hometown of Gori has been reunited with the Russian Federation.

The onus is now on the West to act. However, in order to so, we would first have to wake up. Whenever the collective might of the Western democracies sees an enemy vanquished it has a habit of taking a nap. The democracies defeated Fascism only to face Communism. Communism virtually disappeared only for Radical Islam to arrive. Now Russia is back, and though the signs have long been displayed, so to have they been ignored. The fundamental flaw of Western outlook has been complacency each time a great and challenging ideology is discredited, but the truth is while fascism and communism were defeated, authoritarianism never was. Russia is back, strong and authoritarian, and this time with the oldest of all ideologies: pure power politics.

Tragically, despite all the bloodshed of the twentieth century, the world is once again starting to resemble a giant game of Risk. The US and Europe have to face this reality, just as they met previous threats. Russia’s re-emergence means it is no longer simply content with supporting tyrants and mini-despots, training the armies of rogue states like Myanmar, or disrupting humanitarian efforts on the Security Council. The bear is once again ready for war. However, as always Russia will respond to force. The only question is will the West stand up for the embattled states, who have embraced its promise, yet inhabit Russia’s projected sphere of tyranny? The EU is too divided it would seem, Britain and Russia are already fighting a little renewed Cold War, Barack Obama is probably wondering why the Kremlin never got the credit crunch memo, John McCain is certain to try and use this to his political advantage and Bush is a lame duck with no mandate. Perhaps the ultimate irony of the Bush years will be Soviet-style tanks rolling down the only street ever likely to be named after the president. One hopes not. But one can be sure that if Russia succeeds in Georgia, it will turn elsewhere in Eastern Europe, each time getting a little closer to the EU. Moldova and Ukraine are certainly on the Kremlin’s list.

So Russia has returned. She has used the Olympics as some sort of cover to launch a policy of re-emergence, re-assertion, re-annexation, and in all likelihood, regime change. Funnily enough, not far away from Georgia, in the Russia city of Sochi, they are busily readying themselves for the 2014 Winter Olympics. Will Western leaders boycott those games? Probably not. One at least hopes that by then the West will have defended small countries who have dared to defy the writ of an oppressive neighbour. Will they? Ivan doesn’t think so.