Will he? Won’t he? If he does, what will we…
The air is abuzz with speculations, all liberally laced with primal fear.
Will Putin do to the whole Ukraine what he has already done to the Crimea?
If so, will he stop there?
How forcefully should we oppose him? Surely not all the way to the brink of nuclear war?
Good questions. Wish I had good answers, but I’m all out. However, I can offer a few observations, for whatever they’re worth.
First, here’s an intercepted telephone conversation between two Russian ambassadors in Africa, Messrs Igor Chubarov and Sergei Bakharev. The audio has gone viral on Russian websites, and one of the ambassadors has since acknowledged its authenticity.
Speaking in the customary Putinesque idiom, Mr Chubarov boasted, “This is how I talk to EU ambassadors: ‘Lads, we’ve taken the Crimea but that’s early f****** days yet. Next we’ll take your f****** Catalonia, Venice, Scotland and Alaska. That’s when we’ll take a breather.”
The other heir to the Russian diplomatic tradition of Dolgorukov, Razumovsky and Golitsyn added his own penny’s worth: “Latvia, Estonia and other f****** Europeans, kick’em up the a*** all the way to where they belong.”
This private chat shouldn’t be taken for a coherent enunciation of Russia’s foreign policy. It is, however, symptomatic of the deafening din of imperial chauvinism that, expertly fanned by Putin, is drowning all other sounds in the country.
Parallels with Nazi Germany have been overused over the last month or so, but that doesn’t make them spurious. Then the air thundered with Sieg Heil! Hoch! and Heil Hitler! The air of today’s Russia echoes with the sort of stuff exemplified by the refined exchange between the Russian Metternichs.
The public enthusiasm wasn’t faked then and it isn’t now. There’s no need: the masses are lemmings who’ll follow anyone over the precipice, provided he screams loudly and with psychopathic self-confidence. Muffling all other voices also helps, and KGB Col. Putin is a well-trained past master.
Once we’ve taken a plunge into the murky waters of historical parallels, we might as well dive deeper. In 1938 pro-Hitler thugs, ably assisted by Nazi spies and agent-provocateurs, rioted in Czech streets. When the police timidly tried to quiet them down, Dr Goebbels screamed all over the world that the German minority was being oppressed, and it was Germany’s duty to march in and save it.
Exactly the same sort of thing is happening in the Ukraine, today’s equivalent of Czechoslovakia, and Russia, today’s answer to Nazi Germany (so far in this respect only, but give Putin time).
Over the last few days gangs of pro-Putin thugs have staged provocative pogroms in the Ukrainian cities cursed with large Russian minorities: Donetsk, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Luhansk.
The thugs were flying the flags of the Ukrainian Communist Party, the Soviet Union and Russia. The slogan they were yelling makes historical parallels even harder to resist: “One people! One history! One future!” Is that the Russian for Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer? Same rhythm, same tripartite composition – more important, the same moral impetus.
The hire-a-mob mostly wielded primordial weapons: sticks, stones, bricks, knives and, above all, the fascist ideology. But the Ukraine’s Security Service also reports having confiscated the sort of gear one can’t buy in a corner shop: bombs, 300 machineguns, RPGs, pistols, hand grenades.
Other than taking some of their toys away, the police passively watched as the thugs occupied administrative buildings and decorated them with their favourite flags. A few of the buildings have since been reclaimed, even though they remain engulfed by a sea of frenzied human refuse.
According to some reports, ex-president Yanukovych has returned to the Ukraine, to supervise the pro-Russian riots and beg his good friend Vladimir for help. You know, the sort of help Hitler so generously gave to the Sudeten Germans.
This is where the comparisons must stop. For we don’t know yet whether the parallel lines will follow Euclid by remaining separate or Lobachevsky by converging. Will he or won’t he?
If he doesn’t, he’s not yet a Hitler circa 1938, though he may well be a Hitler circa, say, 1936. Though we’ll do well to remember that it wasn’t just chronologically that 1938 followed 1936, let’s stick to what we know for sure, shall we?
Fanning the toxic fumes of imperial chauvinism to a point where they poison the whole country (90 percent of Russians side with Putin) is a complex business. Tyrannical leaders seldom undertake such projects just for the fun of it, and Putin is like any other tyrant in this respect.
When deafening domestic propaganda is accompanied by provoking and organising riots in foreign cities, the task becomes even more daunting. If Putin has taken it on, it’s not just for the sake of winning the next election – he’s not a Western politician after all.
There’s no doubt whatsoever that Putin’s plan is to recreate the Soviet Union or a close simile thereof, thus going down in history as the Man Who Made Russia Great Again. Gaining control of the Ukraine has to be an essential part of this plan, and this is what’s currently under way.
I don’t know whether Putin will offer fraternal help (the Russian for tanks) to the oppressed Russian minority immediately, in the near future or some time down the road. A lot will depend on the West’s resolve to stop him in his tracks.
The West’s craven response so far must have emboldened Putin no end. He feels he can be reasonably sure that today’s West will echo the 1939 Left Bank intellectuals with their shrugs of “Mourir pour Danzig?”.
Today’s Westerners are no more prepared to die for Kiev than their grandfathers were to do so for Danzig. Yet in due course the choice was taken away from the granddads. Will it be taken away from the grandsons?
I don’t know. But, having grown up fighting Russian bullies, I do know they tend to recoil when hit on the nose before they’ve gone too far.
Yet it takes courage to throw that first punch, and this quality is in short supply in today’s West. So far.