Great analysis. Best and most precise description of the crisis.
In several key aspects, situation in Russia and Ukraine was similar to former Yugoslavia. One has to wonder how will economy and politics determine destiny of Ukraine and Russia in the following years and decades.
Not sure how to read the implications of the main thesis:
such conflicts [as they have taken place in dissolved communist federations] have nothing to do with the type internal arrangement or government, but they have a lot to do with conquest of territory, nationalism, and desire of minorities which happen to be in the “wrong” states to have their own states or to join a neighboring state
for an eventual way out of the conflict in Ukraine. Is the Donbas populated by a minority driven by a desire to join Russia? Or is Russian nationalism incompatible with the continued existence of Ukraine as such? If the latter was the case, however, would not the ‘Russian imperial reflex’ explanation be essentially correct?
The economic dimension however deserves a closer look.
The economic failure of communist regimes is presented as allowing the resurgence of nationalism in the communist world.
This raises an interesting question about the trajectory of post-communist economics. If Ukraine has been a singular economic failure in the post-communist world, Russia has arguably been an economic failure relative to the former communist countries that joined the EU.
For this reason the Russian minorities in the Baltic States are unlikely to be consumed by a desire to join Russia. When highlighting the ethnic divisions in Ukraine arch-realist Mearsheimer shows a poll, where the relative strengths of those in favour of greater integration with the EU (blue) of Russia (red) differ sharply across regions. He fails to note, however, that even in the most pro-Russian regions the ‘reds’ are weaker than the ‘blue’ (as if Democrats outnumbered Republicans even
In the reddest states). In other words, given the choice, even the pro-Russian minorities would on balance prefer staying in an Ukraine joining the EU rather than reuniting with the ‘motherland’. One is tempted to conclude that post-communist economic failure of Russia - at least relative to the former communist countries that were able to join the EU - is fanning Russian nationalism and this the root driver of the conflict, rather than ethnic divisions in Ukraine. Difficult to see a solution.
The reason why many conflicts on are happening on Russia’s European borders (again, putting the Caucasus in the European sphere, as part of European Russia’s borders) and have an ethnic/nationalist flavor is very simple: it was what the capitalist class of the West had to work with.
Had these ethnic problems not existed, the capitalist class – represented at the geopolitical level by the USA – would have had to find another weakness to exploit in order to try to sabotage the USSR and cause problems for capitalist Russia (ex-RSFSR) from within and/or closer to their borders (if they could find).
Let’s just remember that the “soft belly theory” was created by a French philosopher in the 1970s. It was only after it caught Brzezinski’s (or another famous bigwig, don’t remember exactly who) attention that it became the CIA’s official policy, which triggered the Soviet-Afghan War. Notice that, at that point, the ethnic problem was not in the West (European) but in the South. After the fall of the USSR, Afghanistan would become the USA’s problem to solve, so the “soft belly” theory was discarded as a used condom to quickly morph into a War Against Terrorism theory (or, in George W. Bush’s terminology, a “War of Good Against Evil”). But then the focus shifted to Russia’s (not the Russian Federation, fully capitalist) European borders, as the Russian capitalist elite had just expelled the IMF and taken control of Russia’s wealth and the doctrine changed to the further expansion of NATO and the European Union (now fresh from the creation of the Euro Zone).
The recalcitrance of the Russian capitalist elite (which, it is good to remember, does not come from the Politburo/Bolshevik elite, but from the Soviet “middle class” – mostly professors from Leningrad and factory and bank “red managers”, i.e. middle managers of the Late Period USSR) after the RF’s bankruptcy in 1998, summed by the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2003, and the American/Western renewed honeymoon with China after its entrance to the WTO in 2001 suddenly turned Russia’s Asian borders calm while igniting its European borders. The only factor that explains all of those shifts is Western growing hegemony of the world’s affairs since at least late Brezhnev.
The ironic thing of this is that, if true, that would make the Bolsheviks right from the very beginning: nationalism is an intrinsically bourgeois ideological weapon. The problematic countries to Russia nowadays are the republics that, in the Early Bolshevik era, had strong bourgeoisie. Strong bourgeoisie produce strong national sentiments of unit among a certain people at least from the Second Industrial Revolution era and beyond. The nationality with the strongest bourgeoisie by far was Finland, and it immediately got its independence from the USSR (by then, just the RSFSR); the Transcaucasus had strong but not so strong bourgeoisies (an Armenian one and a Georgian one), so the Bolsheviks had some difficulty but managed to pacify and reabsorb them. White Russia had absolutely no bourgeoisie, therefore no nationalist sentiment, and was artificially created and caused no problem in the post-USSR era to the RF. Those Asian ASSRs except Chechnya (which is part of a larger, pan-Islamist identity but was also caught by CIA interference) didn’t even know what a nation-State was, and never caused any problem to the USSR/RF. I then side with Edward H. Carr on the nationalist question: nationalism was a directly proportional problem for the USSR/RF with the strength of those nations’ bourgeoisies – be them hastily created with American money or not (extrapolating from Carr). By the logic of reciprocity, those bourgeoisies see the Russian bourgeoisie as an existential threat, which may be more or less politically motivated, depending on how much dependent they are on constant funding from the American Empire (Roman style absorption of local elites).
If my opinion is correct, then, for the foreseeable future, we should expect two dominant scenarios: since it is clear by now that Russia is going to win the war against Ukraine, we have that either the USA will insist on a two-front war and collapse earlier (I’m speaking here on historical standards, so this “earlier” actually means decades at least) or it will go Byzantine and abandon its eastern front (Western Europe) and shift all of its forces and focus on the conquest of China in the western front (Pacific) – more specifically on Taiwan/Western Japan (which here in the West we call erroneously Southern Japan), case in which the USA will collapse later but decline sooner (the fall of the Eastern American Empire or the American Empire in the East; or, from the European point of view, the Fall of Europe/Second Dark Age). Either way, the Pacific Ocean will have the tendency to be the center of human affairs for the century to come: if the USA loses the Pacific, it will lose its status as a “universal” empire, just like the loss of the Balkans and Egypt did to the Byzantine Empire.
I agree that the strength of nationalism (in the examples you give) was directly proportional to economic development and the desire to create own nation-state.
The war in Ukraine, in my opinion, is a result of different and complex issues and so it cannot be explained by relying on one particular theory. The Russian century of humiliation and rise of Russian nationalism is of course one reason, the unequal treatment of national minorities in Ukraine (not just Russian, but also Hungarian etc.) a second reason. Then, there's the NATO expansion and Ukrainian desire to join NATO, they have this also in the Ukrainian constitution. We can name this the real-political factor. Not to talk about the complex Russo-Ukrainian history.
In my opinion, this war was inevitable, even if one could imagine a liberal democratic Russia from one's dreams. Any Russian government that cared about its sovereignty would probably act in a similar way, because even someone like Navalny in his time said that Ukrainian membership in NATO is a big no-no. My opinion is that no matter how nationalistic or imperialistic a country is, it would no go to military adventures if it was not strong enough economically or militarily (and Russia was not), unless it viewed the possible invasion only in exceptional circumstances to safeguard its own sovereignty. To illustrate my point, if Taiwan proclaimed independence with help of foreign powers 40 years ago, China despite being really weak would probably go to war over it, because this is a fundamental Chinese interest.
And the other reality is that no matter how democratic Russia would be, it would never be allowed to join the European Union or NATO because of its territorial size, population size and military potential.
Agree. Russia is just too big for Europe. Turkey too. That of course implies a very different policy from the one preferred (or dictated) by the EU. But it does not imply wars.
When Mao stepped onto the world stage in 1945 his country was convulsed by civil war, Russia had taken Mongolia and a piece of Xinjiang, Japan still occupied three northern provinces, Britain had taken Hong Kong, Portugal Macau, France pieces of Shanghai, Germany Tsingtao, and America dominated the opium trade.
In 1949 China was agrarian, backward, feudalistic, ignorant and violent. Of its four hundred million people, fifty-million were drug addicts, eighty percent could neither read nor write and life expectancy was thirty-five years. Peasants paid seventy percent of their produce in rent, women’s feet were bound, desperate mothers sold their children in exchange for food and poor people, preferring slavery to starvation, sold themselves. U.S. Ambassador John Leighton Stuart reported that, during his second year in China, ten million people starved to death in three provinces. The Japanese had killed twenty-million and General Chiang Kai-Shek wrote that, of every thousand youths he recruited, barely a hundred survived the march to training base.
By 1974 Mao had doubled the population, doubled life expectancy, reunited, reimagined, reformed and revitalized the largest, oldest civilization on earth, modernized it after a century of failed modernizations, liberated more women than anyone in history and ended thousands of years of famines. A strategist without peer, political innovator, he was a master geopolitician and a Confucian peasant, under crushing embargoes Mao had grown GDP by 7.3 percent annually and left the country debt-free.
Harvard’s professor of Chinese Studies, John King Fairbanks, summarized[1] his legacy: “The simple facts of Mao's career seem incredible: in a vast land of 400 million people, at age 28 with a dozen others to found a party and in the next fifty years to win power, organize, and remold the people and reshape the land–history records no greater achievement. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, all the kings of Europe, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lenin–no predecessor can equal Mao Tse-tung's scope of accomplishment, for no other country was ever so ancient and so big as China. Indeed Mao's achievement is almost beyond our comprehension”. [Fairbanks, The United States and China].
Looking back through the lens of economic habits, practices, stats and reports, we can impute the scale of Mao's achievement. He's called the founder of modern China because he designed and laid the foundation on which the economy and civil society rests. In doing so, he rejected, for example, the Soviet practice of building gigantic, centralized industrial facilities in the name of 'efficiency' and instead created the most decentralized (to this day) economy on earth. And that's less than 1% of his foundational role.
These three articles examine each of Mao's most famous campaigns:
Portugal had not taken Macau. Macau was an imperial lease for a few centuries by that point. It wasn't conquered or taken and kept under the threat of cannons.
So the fact that ultra-nationalists in Ukraine got the upper hand and started persecuting all the major minorities in Ukraine, especially Russians is of no issue. Russia is to be blamed!? Because it has power?!
The ultra nationalists in Ukraine want "purity of the blood". As such, burning alive 40-50 people of Russian ethnicity in Odessa in 2014 or killing about 2500 civilians in Donbas between 2014 and 2021 is nothing to talk about when one wants purification of the land of the bad blood. Russians in Ukraine have three options: become Ukrainians (culturally speaking as well as they also must hate Russia and anything pertaining with Russian culture: self hating Russians), leave Ukraine, or die.
We do not speak about that in Canada... Same way we do not recognize the oppression of ethnic Russians and other minorities in Ukraine. In Canada only aboriginal people and other ethnic minorities and other genderized, racialized and sexualized minorities can claim past, present, and future oppression...
Actually, in Ukraine the persecution has been legalized since 2014, while the Ukrainian nationalism has been steadily growing since 1990s. I Quebec is less in your face.
Thank you for providing additional information. You have given me reason to look into this, and I have started doing so.
I take seriously the Venice Commission's several reports on language issues in Ukraine, as well as commentary by Human Rights Watch.
There is drastic tension between many decades of suppression of Ukrainian in the Soviet era, and the de-russification measures adopted in independent Ukraine. If Ukraine wants EU membership, then it should at least abide by the EU minority rights requirements.
I do not think that language issues can justify Putin's reckless invasion of Ukraine. War cannot resolve on a fair basis the language issues in Ukraine. Putin's insistence that Ukraine should not exist cannot qualify as reasonable position on balancing language rights of majorities and minorities within Ukraine.
No, it is not the language issues. remember, 2,500 civilians killed by Ukrainians in Donbas between 2014 and 2021. Also, in early February 2022, the amassed Ukrainian forces around Donbas have started a massive artillery shooting on Donbas, indicating a preparation for attack (all verifiable from OECD reports). The Donbas Republics leaderships has then requested Russian support.
Russia recognized these two regions as independent and signed treaties of support on February 22. Western sanctions started immediately. Russia only attacked on February 24, after the first massive salvo in the western economic war has been launched at it.
Going through these legal steps, Russia invoqued Article 51 of UN Charter that provides international legal coverage for the subsequent attack on Ukraine. In a legal contest on these issues, Russia cannot but win. The recognition of the two Donbas Republics as independent cannot be challenged by the west, when they did the same with Kosovo. Furthermore, US/NATO, attacked Serbia first in 1999 (illegal war under UN Charter and under UN) and only later recognized Kosovo as independent. Russia ticked all the legal boxes first and then started a legally justifiable war. This legality has not been challenged by anyone and has not been talked about at all in the western media. Just votes (Russia kind of wins there too) and screams of indignation.
Plus, please provide me with citations where Putin insisted that Ukraine should not exist. I have been personally reading all Putin's speeches and major press meetings and I have never, ever encountered anything that would remotely come close to what you are asserting. Same about Putin threatening nuclear war. Shameless lies! No evidence for that in his utterances.
the economic failure of the communist model of development?
The failure was one of management, not ideology. There is no governance tradition in Russian society , as there is in China, whose communist model of development under Mao grew the economy faster than any, ever.
The fastest economic development ever took place in China only After it moved away from the Maoist/Stalinist model - in the Deng era. There was quite definitely a failure of ideology, esp. the hyper-voluntarism of the Great Leap Forward.
What came first - the mafia (dictators that dictate the business environment) or the ideas about nationalism and democracy (that actually form the business climate)? What will crack and disappear forever first - the mafia or the advertised abstract ideas? Is the mafia in USA powerful enough to devide USA into truly sovereign States as it did in Eastern Europe? I know there is Californian nationalism, Washington State nationalism. They are also Californian billionaires, New Jersey billionaires, Washington D.C. billionaires that don't like eachother and will do everything to thwart the plans of the billionaires that think too much out of their own box.
1. Russian nationalism in russia is overstated - it is very visible, but it just doesn't catch fire, like it did in Ukraine in case of Ukrainian nationalism. It might yet, ironically, fuelled by the war. Why ironically? Because
1.5 Russia is not a mono-national state. While yes, 80% of population is Russian, and it qualifies as such under UN standards, a) several key minorities live in territorial clusters (Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Dagestan's various people) which makes it natural for them to jump ship if Russian nationalism flares up in earnest b) majority of Russians will just go along with wherever the active minority takes them. Which means that any serious flare up of Russian nationalism poses THE most significant risk for the integrity of the Russian Federation.
Uhh I don't know but Russians going around killing Chechens, Central Asian laborers, and their lawyers with little resistance from the authorities seems like nationalism 'catching fire' to me. And this all happened in the 2000's.
I think you are using the wrong yardstick. Consider this - has the number of Chechens, Central Asian labourers and others increased in, say, Moscow, or decreased? And compare it to the dynamics of numbers of Russians in Chechnya and, say, Tadjikistan, compared to Soviet times. You will always have everyday domestic nationalism wherever 2 or more nationalities are living together, but it is very different from a systemic one both in expression and in results.
Btw, despite high visibility of headline cases, per capita crime rate of Russians vs. Central Asians is almost an order of magnitude lower than the other way around (for Moscow), and roughly in line with the general crime rate. These stats are published yearly, there are variations, but no trend.
The lack of attractiveness of the Russian economic model toward satellites and neighbours as a possible driver of Russian military expansionism is supported by the following analysis by a former governor of the Czech central bank, arguing that, for a number of reasons, Russian GDP may be substantially overestimated:
I'm encompassing the two posts (parts I and II) in this comment. After making my arguments against all “four theories” I will lay down my own at a second comment.
Why I think each of the “four theories” are wrong:
(1) is wrong because it is simply wrong: there is no empirical evidence Ukraine is “democratic” while Russia is “autocratic”. The interesting thing to observe here is what the West really means by using those two terms: by “democracy” they really mean a decentralized system, while by “autocracy” they simply mean any centralized political system. For example: Barack Obama was nominated and elected thanks exclusively to the Chicagoan financial elite. Nobody in their right state of mind would call the process which he became the 44th POTUS democratic. Yes, the people voted on him, but it didn't choose him. The most we can tell is that his election was a democracy between the capitalist elite (i.e. an oligarchy), but not between the American people as a whole.
However, the fact that, in a moment of crisis, the Chicagoan faction of the capitalist class came up with a solution and manifested it into a candidate (Obama) makes a difference, as it indicates a decentralized system: the capitalist class doesn't have a royal family or an imperial family; instead it is a confederation of individual capitalists who fight between each other constantly and, as such, divide the spoils of the economic space (which is the geographic space modified by the bourgeoisie as the dominant class) between themselves. That is why Marxists classify capitalism as an anarchic mode of production - or, in a more pejorative sense and to differentiate it from Anarchy the far-left ideology, “bourgeois anarchy”.
The only thing that legitimizes democracy over all the other possible political system is its universality: every human being in existence can vote, and the majority of them is by definition infallible. Yes, that means real democracy doesn't exist even today, since even children, babies (including the newborn), the illiterate and the people who are in a coma should have the right to vote. Any democracy that doesn't give the absolute totality of human beings alive the right to vote is, philosophically speaking, a variation of oligarchy by definition (even if such oligarchy is the majority, because it wouldn't manifest the will of Humankind, but only of an “oligarchy” that, by pure mathematical chance, would be the majority).
That's why I prefer Gramsci definition of oriental and occidental States (centralized and decentralized, respectively), and not the liberal autocracy (and its Cold War variation, Totalitarianism) and democracy. I think that it is the scientifically more useful model.
(2) is also wrong for the simple fact it is empirically wrong: for starters, the most egregious case of Bolshevik “social engineering” as per Putin's definition was not Ukraine, but Belarus, where the White Russians didn't even want their own nation but were forced from above to have one. And, nowadays, year 2022 CE, Belarus not only is not a problem to Russia, but probably its most loyal and secure ally. Putin's “Bolshevik social engineering theory”/“Lenin's time bomb theory”, therefore, doesn't explain the success case of Belarus – which is even more artificial than Ukraine if we use the ethnic definition for a nation-State. It also doesn't explain why the minor ASSRs – specially those of the east – plus the Asian ex-SSRs are firm and majorly non-problematical allies of Russia, as they are as artificial as Ukraine in the ethnic sense.
But the major fault of the “Bolshevik social engineering theory”/“Lenin's time bomb theory” is that it ignores one obvious geographic feature of the RF's border problems: 99% of them (if not 100%) are in its European/Western borders (for geopolitical purposes, the Caucasus is part of the Western border, as we're assuming the ethnic concept of nation-State is correct). In my opinion, this is intentional by Putin, but I'll explain my case when I lay my own opinion, at the end of this comment.
(3) is wrong for the same logical reason as (2) – just change the ethnic motive for the democratic motive. Again, it doesn’t explain the cases of the Asian SSRs, and it certainly doesn’t explain why most of the ASSRs stayed with Russia.
(4) comes closer to the truth, but is still incomplete and still lacks more erudition and study.
It’s main problem is that it doesn’t explain why the restoration of capitalism in the USSR space did not bring the instant material prosperity most expected: after all, if socialism was the problem and capitalism was the solution, then the quick fall of socialism and the quick installation of capitalism (at breakneck speed, thanks to the IMF’s “Shock Therapy” doctrine) should have brought the correspondent quick and big economic boom to the totality of the ex-USSR newly formed capitalist republics – be they “democratic” or not.
The USSR whatever its advertised structure, was an empire and Ukraine was one of its colonies - acquired by Catherine the Great. The present war is an anti-colonial war. It occurred because Russia is trying to regain its empire, as France tried in Indo-China in 1950s. Theory 2 is correct.
The USSR provided a sort of legitimacy to nationalist ideas, but they existed for hundreds of years before that. Starting at 1989, as Theory 4 does, elides too much history.
Communism was a vehicle that Vietnamese nationalism used, and no doubt it motivated many Viet Minh fighters. Likewise Ukrainians now fight for democracy (and even the EU) as an expression of their nationalist aspirations. Democratic ideas are important, and only Theory 1 mentions them.
So Theory 2 should surely stand as the jumping off point, not Theory 3, and Theory 1 is right to mention democracy.
Historically it is not easy to mark Ukraine on a map. Has Ukrainian nationalism has actually been supplied definite borders by the Russian incursion? British India broke up not on nationalist lines but religious ones - did the British Empire actually create the Indian nation?
The economic-basis argument the author makes seems a little odd to me. If Russia was so much more successful economically than independent Ukraine (relatively, not in world terms), then how does economics support a motivation for Putin's present invasion of Ukraine?
Comments from an interested and not totally uninformed amateur.
Back to Part 1: The Maidan revolution was a revolt against a "legitimately" elected government? What kind of Russian English on the cue ball led to Yanukovych's election? Surely he was a Putin wingman, and his "subjects" wanted no part of Putin's program. So they revolted. Maybe the concept of legitimacy needs some deeper examination.
And the other countries that opted out of the post-Soviet "influence" sphere . . . most of them had experienced Russian domination off and on for decades to centuries and wanted no further part of it . . . so they ran to get under the NATO umbrella. Nationalism or just a desire to not be subjected to a certain continuation of the ruthless rule of Soviet Russia. Nationalism or personal protection on a communal scale? RIP John Mearsheimer.
Yanukovich was legitimately elected and was no sort of Putin's wingman. Moreover, he was not Putin's preferred candidate in 2010 - it was Timoshenko. Sure, Yanukovich was an unpleasant guy (and Putin always despised him), but his policy of getting noney from both sides was rather sensible for Ukraine.
"The Maidan massacre trials and investigations have revealed various evidence that four killed and several dozen wounded policemen and at least the absolute majority of 49 killed and 157 wounded Maidan protesters were massacred on February 20, 2014 by snipers in Maidan-controlled buildings and areas. Such evidence includes testimonies of the absolute majority of wounded protesters, several dozens of prosecution witnesses, dozens of defense witnesses, and 14 self-admitted members of Maidan snipers groups. Videos presented at the trial showed that times of shooting of the absolute majority of protesters did not coincide with times of shooting by the Berkut policemen, who were charged with their massacre. Forensic medical examinations determined that the overwhelming majority of the protesters were shot from steep directions from the sides or the back. Initial ballistic examinations did not match bullets extracted from the bodies of killed and wounded protesters to the Berkut Kalashnikovs. Forensic examinations of the bullet holes by the government experts for the Maidan massacre trial suggested that Berkut policemen were shooting in the Hotel Ukraina snipers above the Maidan protesters and in trees and poles. The analysis shows cover-up and stonewalling of the investigations and trials by the Maidan governments and the far right. The prosecution denied that there were any snipers in the Maidan-controlled buildings. Not a single person is convicted or under arrest for the massacre of the protesters and the police almost 8 years after one of the most documented mass killings in history."
Great analysis. Best and most precise description of the crisis.
In several key aspects, situation in Russia and Ukraine was similar to former Yugoslavia. One has to wonder how will economy and politics determine destiny of Ukraine and Russia in the following years and decades.
Not sure how to read the implications of the main thesis:
such conflicts [as they have taken place in dissolved communist federations] have nothing to do with the type internal arrangement or government, but they have a lot to do with conquest of territory, nationalism, and desire of minorities which happen to be in the “wrong” states to have their own states or to join a neighboring state
for an eventual way out of the conflict in Ukraine. Is the Donbas populated by a minority driven by a desire to join Russia? Or is Russian nationalism incompatible with the continued existence of Ukraine as such? If the latter was the case, however, would not the ‘Russian imperial reflex’ explanation be essentially correct?
The economic dimension however deserves a closer look.
The economic failure of communist regimes is presented as allowing the resurgence of nationalism in the communist world.
This raises an interesting question about the trajectory of post-communist economics. If Ukraine has been a singular economic failure in the post-communist world, Russia has arguably been an economic failure relative to the former communist countries that joined the EU.
For this reason the Russian minorities in the Baltic States are unlikely to be consumed by a desire to join Russia. When highlighting the ethnic divisions in Ukraine arch-realist Mearsheimer shows a poll, where the relative strengths of those in favour of greater integration with the EU (blue) of Russia (red) differ sharply across regions. He fails to note, however, that even in the most pro-Russian regions the ‘reds’ are weaker than the ‘blue’ (as if Democrats outnumbered Republicans even
In the reddest states). In other words, given the choice, even the pro-Russian minorities would on balance prefer staying in an Ukraine joining the EU rather than reuniting with the ‘motherland’. One is tempted to conclude that post-communist economic failure of Russia - at least relative to the former communist countries that were able to join the EU - is fanning Russian nationalism and this the root driver of the conflict, rather than ethnic divisions in Ukraine. Difficult to see a solution.
My opinion on this:
The reason why many conflicts on are happening on Russia’s European borders (again, putting the Caucasus in the European sphere, as part of European Russia’s borders) and have an ethnic/nationalist flavor is very simple: it was what the capitalist class of the West had to work with.
Had these ethnic problems not existed, the capitalist class – represented at the geopolitical level by the USA – would have had to find another weakness to exploit in order to try to sabotage the USSR and cause problems for capitalist Russia (ex-RSFSR) from within and/or closer to their borders (if they could find).
Let’s just remember that the “soft belly theory” was created by a French philosopher in the 1970s. It was only after it caught Brzezinski’s (or another famous bigwig, don’t remember exactly who) attention that it became the CIA’s official policy, which triggered the Soviet-Afghan War. Notice that, at that point, the ethnic problem was not in the West (European) but in the South. After the fall of the USSR, Afghanistan would become the USA’s problem to solve, so the “soft belly” theory was discarded as a used condom to quickly morph into a War Against Terrorism theory (or, in George W. Bush’s terminology, a “War of Good Against Evil”). But then the focus shifted to Russia’s (not the Russian Federation, fully capitalist) European borders, as the Russian capitalist elite had just expelled the IMF and taken control of Russia’s wealth and the doctrine changed to the further expansion of NATO and the European Union (now fresh from the creation of the Euro Zone).
The recalcitrance of the Russian capitalist elite (which, it is good to remember, does not come from the Politburo/Bolshevik elite, but from the Soviet “middle class” – mostly professors from Leningrad and factory and bank “red managers”, i.e. middle managers of the Late Period USSR) after the RF’s bankruptcy in 1998, summed by the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2003, and the American/Western renewed honeymoon with China after its entrance to the WTO in 2001 suddenly turned Russia’s Asian borders calm while igniting its European borders. The only factor that explains all of those shifts is Western growing hegemony of the world’s affairs since at least late Brezhnev.
The ironic thing of this is that, if true, that would make the Bolsheviks right from the very beginning: nationalism is an intrinsically bourgeois ideological weapon. The problematic countries to Russia nowadays are the republics that, in the Early Bolshevik era, had strong bourgeoisie. Strong bourgeoisie produce strong national sentiments of unit among a certain people at least from the Second Industrial Revolution era and beyond. The nationality with the strongest bourgeoisie by far was Finland, and it immediately got its independence from the USSR (by then, just the RSFSR); the Transcaucasus had strong but not so strong bourgeoisies (an Armenian one and a Georgian one), so the Bolsheviks had some difficulty but managed to pacify and reabsorb them. White Russia had absolutely no bourgeoisie, therefore no nationalist sentiment, and was artificially created and caused no problem in the post-USSR era to the RF. Those Asian ASSRs except Chechnya (which is part of a larger, pan-Islamist identity but was also caught by CIA interference) didn’t even know what a nation-State was, and never caused any problem to the USSR/RF. I then side with Edward H. Carr on the nationalist question: nationalism was a directly proportional problem for the USSR/RF with the strength of those nations’ bourgeoisies – be them hastily created with American money or not (extrapolating from Carr). By the logic of reciprocity, those bourgeoisies see the Russian bourgeoisie as an existential threat, which may be more or less politically motivated, depending on how much dependent they are on constant funding from the American Empire (Roman style absorption of local elites).
If my opinion is correct, then, for the foreseeable future, we should expect two dominant scenarios: since it is clear by now that Russia is going to win the war against Ukraine, we have that either the USA will insist on a two-front war and collapse earlier (I’m speaking here on historical standards, so this “earlier” actually means decades at least) or it will go Byzantine and abandon its eastern front (Western Europe) and shift all of its forces and focus on the conquest of China in the western front (Pacific) – more specifically on Taiwan/Western Japan (which here in the West we call erroneously Southern Japan), case in which the USA will collapse later but decline sooner (the fall of the Eastern American Empire or the American Empire in the East; or, from the European point of view, the Fall of Europe/Second Dark Age). Either way, the Pacific Ocean will have the tendency to be the center of human affairs for the century to come: if the USA loses the Pacific, it will lose its status as a “universal” empire, just like the loss of the Balkans and Egypt did to the Byzantine Empire.
I agree that the strength of nationalism (in the examples you give) was directly proportional to economic development and the desire to create own nation-state.
The war in Ukraine, in my opinion, is a result of different and complex issues and so it cannot be explained by relying on one particular theory. The Russian century of humiliation and rise of Russian nationalism is of course one reason, the unequal treatment of national minorities in Ukraine (not just Russian, but also Hungarian etc.) a second reason. Then, there's the NATO expansion and Ukrainian desire to join NATO, they have this also in the Ukrainian constitution. We can name this the real-political factor. Not to talk about the complex Russo-Ukrainian history.
In my opinion, this war was inevitable, even if one could imagine a liberal democratic Russia from one's dreams. Any Russian government that cared about its sovereignty would probably act in a similar way, because even someone like Navalny in his time said that Ukrainian membership in NATO is a big no-no. My opinion is that no matter how nationalistic or imperialistic a country is, it would no go to military adventures if it was not strong enough economically or militarily (and Russia was not), unless it viewed the possible invasion only in exceptional circumstances to safeguard its own sovereignty. To illustrate my point, if Taiwan proclaimed independence with help of foreign powers 40 years ago, China despite being really weak would probably go to war over it, because this is a fundamental Chinese interest.
And the other reality is that no matter how democratic Russia would be, it would never be allowed to join the European Union or NATO because of its territorial size, population size and military potential.
Agree. Russia is just too big for Europe. Turkey too. That of course implies a very different policy from the one preferred (or dictated) by the EU. But it does not imply wars.
When Mao stepped onto the world stage in 1945 his country was convulsed by civil war, Russia had taken Mongolia and a piece of Xinjiang, Japan still occupied three northern provinces, Britain had taken Hong Kong, Portugal Macau, France pieces of Shanghai, Germany Tsingtao, and America dominated the opium trade.
In 1949 China was agrarian, backward, feudalistic, ignorant and violent. Of its four hundred million people, fifty-million were drug addicts, eighty percent could neither read nor write and life expectancy was thirty-five years. Peasants paid seventy percent of their produce in rent, women’s feet were bound, desperate mothers sold their children in exchange for food and poor people, preferring slavery to starvation, sold themselves. U.S. Ambassador John Leighton Stuart reported that, during his second year in China, ten million people starved to death in three provinces. The Japanese had killed twenty-million and General Chiang Kai-Shek wrote that, of every thousand youths he recruited, barely a hundred survived the march to training base.
By 1974 Mao had doubled the population, doubled life expectancy, reunited, reimagined, reformed and revitalized the largest, oldest civilization on earth, modernized it after a century of failed modernizations, liberated more women than anyone in history and ended thousands of years of famines. A strategist without peer, political innovator, he was a master geopolitician and a Confucian peasant, under crushing embargoes Mao had grown GDP by 7.3 percent annually and left the country debt-free.
Harvard’s professor of Chinese Studies, John King Fairbanks, summarized[1] his legacy: “The simple facts of Mao's career seem incredible: in a vast land of 400 million people, at age 28 with a dozen others to found a party and in the next fifty years to win power, organize, and remold the people and reshape the land–history records no greater achievement. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, all the kings of Europe, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lenin–no predecessor can equal Mao Tse-tung's scope of accomplishment, for no other country was ever so ancient and so big as China. Indeed Mao's achievement is almost beyond our comprehension”. [Fairbanks, The United States and China].
Looking back through the lens of economic habits, practices, stats and reports, we can impute the scale of Mao's achievement. He's called the founder of modern China because he designed and laid the foundation on which the economy and civil society rests. In doing so, he rejected, for example, the Soviet practice of building gigantic, centralized industrial facilities in the name of 'efficiency' and instead created the most decentralized (to this day) economy on earth. And that's less than 1% of his foundational role.
These three articles examine each of Mao's most famous campaigns:
http://www.unz.com/article/mao-reconsidered/?highlight=mao
http://www.unz.com/article/mao-reconsidered-part-two-whose-famine/
http://www.unz.com/article/the-great-proletarian-cultural-revolution/
Portugal had not taken Macau. Macau was an imperial lease for a few centuries by that point. It wasn't conquered or taken and kept under the threat of cannons.
So the fact that ultra-nationalists in Ukraine got the upper hand and started persecuting all the major minorities in Ukraine, especially Russians is of no issue. Russia is to be blamed!? Because it has power?!
Where is the evidence of Ukraine's persecution of its Russian minority?
If Romanians and Hungarians are persecuted, you can bet your house that Russians are even more persecuted:
https://hungarytoday.hu/after-hungary-romania-also-criticizes-ukraines-minority-law/
The presently voted Minority Law by Ukrainian Rada seems to give no rights to Russian ethnic Ukrainians.
In 2019 Venice Commission criticized Ukraine for its handling of minorities:
https://www.venice.coe.int/webforms/documents/default.aspx?pdffile=CDL-AD(2019)032-e
The ultra nationalists in Ukraine want "purity of the blood". As such, burning alive 40-50 people of Russian ethnicity in Odessa in 2014 or killing about 2500 civilians in Donbas between 2014 and 2021 is nothing to talk about when one wants purification of the land of the bad blood. Russians in Ukraine have three options: become Ukrainians (culturally speaking as well as they also must hate Russia and anything pertaining with Russian culture: self hating Russians), leave Ukraine, or die.
Yes, Russians experience horrible and intolerable persecution in Ukraine just like English-speakers in Quebec.
We do not speak about that in Canada... Same way we do not recognize the oppression of ethnic Russians and other minorities in Ukraine. In Canada only aboriginal people and other ethnic minorities and other genderized, racialized and sexualized minorities can claim past, present, and future oppression...
Thank you for proving my point!
Actually, in Ukraine the persecution has been legalized since 2014, while the Ukrainian nationalism has been steadily growing since 1990s. I Quebec is less in your face.
Thank you for providing additional information. You have given me reason to look into this, and I have started doing so.
I take seriously the Venice Commission's several reports on language issues in Ukraine, as well as commentary by Human Rights Watch.
There is drastic tension between many decades of suppression of Ukrainian in the Soviet era, and the de-russification measures adopted in independent Ukraine. If Ukraine wants EU membership, then it should at least abide by the EU minority rights requirements.
I do not think that language issues can justify Putin's reckless invasion of Ukraine. War cannot resolve on a fair basis the language issues in Ukraine. Putin's insistence that Ukraine should not exist cannot qualify as reasonable position on balancing language rights of majorities and minorities within Ukraine.
No, it is not the language issues. remember, 2,500 civilians killed by Ukrainians in Donbas between 2014 and 2021. Also, in early February 2022, the amassed Ukrainian forces around Donbas have started a massive artillery shooting on Donbas, indicating a preparation for attack (all verifiable from OECD reports). The Donbas Republics leaderships has then requested Russian support.
Russia recognized these two regions as independent and signed treaties of support on February 22. Western sanctions started immediately. Russia only attacked on February 24, after the first massive salvo in the western economic war has been launched at it.
Going through these legal steps, Russia invoqued Article 51 of UN Charter that provides international legal coverage for the subsequent attack on Ukraine. In a legal contest on these issues, Russia cannot but win. The recognition of the two Donbas Republics as independent cannot be challenged by the west, when they did the same with Kosovo. Furthermore, US/NATO, attacked Serbia first in 1999 (illegal war under UN Charter and under UN) and only later recognized Kosovo as independent. Russia ticked all the legal boxes first and then started a legally justifiable war. This legality has not been challenged by anyone and has not been talked about at all in the western media. Just votes (Russia kind of wins there too) and screams of indignation.
Plus, please provide me with citations where Putin insisted that Ukraine should not exist. I have been personally reading all Putin's speeches and major press meetings and I have never, ever encountered anything that would remotely come close to what you are asserting. Same about Putin threatening nuclear war. Shameless lies! No evidence for that in his utterances.
с Новым Годом!
the economic failure of the communist model of development?
The failure was one of management, not ideology. There is no governance tradition in Russian society , as there is in China, whose communist model of development under Mao grew the economy faster than any, ever.
The fastest economic development ever took place in China only After it moved away from the Maoist/Stalinist model - in the Deng era. There was quite definitely a failure of ideology, esp. the hyper-voluntarism of the Great Leap Forward.
What came first - the mafia (dictators that dictate the business environment) or the ideas about nationalism and democracy (that actually form the business climate)? What will crack and disappear forever first - the mafia or the advertised abstract ideas? Is the mafia in USA powerful enough to devide USA into truly sovereign States as it did in Eastern Europe? I know there is Californian nationalism, Washington State nationalism. They are also Californian billionaires, New Jersey billionaires, Washington D.C. billionaires that don't like eachother and will do everything to thwart the plans of the billionaires that think too much out of their own box.
Brilliant analysis, thank you very much.
I may add 2 (well, 1.5, actually) things.
1. Russian nationalism in russia is overstated - it is very visible, but it just doesn't catch fire, like it did in Ukraine in case of Ukrainian nationalism. It might yet, ironically, fuelled by the war. Why ironically? Because
1.5 Russia is not a mono-national state. While yes, 80% of population is Russian, and it qualifies as such under UN standards, a) several key minorities live in territorial clusters (Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, Dagestan's various people) which makes it natural for them to jump ship if Russian nationalism flares up in earnest b) majority of Russians will just go along with wherever the active minority takes them. Which means that any serious flare up of Russian nationalism poses THE most significant risk for the integrity of the Russian Federation.
Totally agree. Putin has opened the Pandora's box.
Uhh I don't know but Russians going around killing Chechens, Central Asian laborers, and their lawyers with little resistance from the authorities seems like nationalism 'catching fire' to me. And this all happened in the 2000's.
I think you are using the wrong yardstick. Consider this - has the number of Chechens, Central Asian labourers and others increased in, say, Moscow, or decreased? And compare it to the dynamics of numbers of Russians in Chechnya and, say, Tadjikistan, compared to Soviet times. You will always have everyday domestic nationalism wherever 2 or more nationalities are living together, but it is very different from a systemic one both in expression and in results.
Btw, despite high visibility of headline cases, per capita crime rate of Russians vs. Central Asians is almost an order of magnitude lower than the other way around (for Moscow), and roughly in line with the general crime rate. These stats are published yearly, there are variations, but no trend.
The lack of attractiveness of the Russian economic model toward satellites and neighbours as a possible driver of Russian military expansionism is supported by the following analysis by a former governor of the Czech central bank, arguing that, for a number of reasons, Russian GDP may be substantially overestimated:
https://www.omfif.org/2022/12/most-read-2022-russias-economy-may-be-much-smaller-than-reported/
I'm encompassing the two posts (parts I and II) in this comment. After making my arguments against all “four theories” I will lay down my own at a second comment.
Why I think each of the “four theories” are wrong:
(1) is wrong because it is simply wrong: there is no empirical evidence Ukraine is “democratic” while Russia is “autocratic”. The interesting thing to observe here is what the West really means by using those two terms: by “democracy” they really mean a decentralized system, while by “autocracy” they simply mean any centralized political system. For example: Barack Obama was nominated and elected thanks exclusively to the Chicagoan financial elite. Nobody in their right state of mind would call the process which he became the 44th POTUS democratic. Yes, the people voted on him, but it didn't choose him. The most we can tell is that his election was a democracy between the capitalist elite (i.e. an oligarchy), but not between the American people as a whole.
However, the fact that, in a moment of crisis, the Chicagoan faction of the capitalist class came up with a solution and manifested it into a candidate (Obama) makes a difference, as it indicates a decentralized system: the capitalist class doesn't have a royal family or an imperial family; instead it is a confederation of individual capitalists who fight between each other constantly and, as such, divide the spoils of the economic space (which is the geographic space modified by the bourgeoisie as the dominant class) between themselves. That is why Marxists classify capitalism as an anarchic mode of production - or, in a more pejorative sense and to differentiate it from Anarchy the far-left ideology, “bourgeois anarchy”.
The only thing that legitimizes democracy over all the other possible political system is its universality: every human being in existence can vote, and the majority of them is by definition infallible. Yes, that means real democracy doesn't exist even today, since even children, babies (including the newborn), the illiterate and the people who are in a coma should have the right to vote. Any democracy that doesn't give the absolute totality of human beings alive the right to vote is, philosophically speaking, a variation of oligarchy by definition (even if such oligarchy is the majority, because it wouldn't manifest the will of Humankind, but only of an “oligarchy” that, by pure mathematical chance, would be the majority).
That's why I prefer Gramsci definition of oriental and occidental States (centralized and decentralized, respectively), and not the liberal autocracy (and its Cold War variation, Totalitarianism) and democracy. I think that it is the scientifically more useful model.
(2) is also wrong for the simple fact it is empirically wrong: for starters, the most egregious case of Bolshevik “social engineering” as per Putin's definition was not Ukraine, but Belarus, where the White Russians didn't even want their own nation but were forced from above to have one. And, nowadays, year 2022 CE, Belarus not only is not a problem to Russia, but probably its most loyal and secure ally. Putin's “Bolshevik social engineering theory”/“Lenin's time bomb theory”, therefore, doesn't explain the success case of Belarus – which is even more artificial than Ukraine if we use the ethnic definition for a nation-State. It also doesn't explain why the minor ASSRs – specially those of the east – plus the Asian ex-SSRs are firm and majorly non-problematical allies of Russia, as they are as artificial as Ukraine in the ethnic sense.
But the major fault of the “Bolshevik social engineering theory”/“Lenin's time bomb theory” is that it ignores one obvious geographic feature of the RF's border problems: 99% of them (if not 100%) are in its European/Western borders (for geopolitical purposes, the Caucasus is part of the Western border, as we're assuming the ethnic concept of nation-State is correct). In my opinion, this is intentional by Putin, but I'll explain my case when I lay my own opinion, at the end of this comment.
(3) is wrong for the same logical reason as (2) – just change the ethnic motive for the democratic motive. Again, it doesn’t explain the cases of the Asian SSRs, and it certainly doesn’t explain why most of the ASSRs stayed with Russia.
(4) comes closer to the truth, but is still incomplete and still lacks more erudition and study.
It’s main problem is that it doesn’t explain why the restoration of capitalism in the USSR space did not bring the instant material prosperity most expected: after all, if socialism was the problem and capitalism was the solution, then the quick fall of socialism and the quick installation of capitalism (at breakneck speed, thanks to the IMF’s “Shock Therapy” doctrine) should have brought the correspondent quick and big economic boom to the totality of the ex-USSR newly formed capitalist republics – be they “democratic” or not.
The USSR whatever its advertised structure, was an empire and Ukraine was one of its colonies - acquired by Catherine the Great. The present war is an anti-colonial war. It occurred because Russia is trying to regain its empire, as France tried in Indo-China in 1950s. Theory 2 is correct.
The USSR provided a sort of legitimacy to nationalist ideas, but they existed for hundreds of years before that. Starting at 1989, as Theory 4 does, elides too much history.
Communism was a vehicle that Vietnamese nationalism used, and no doubt it motivated many Viet Minh fighters. Likewise Ukrainians now fight for democracy (and even the EU) as an expression of their nationalist aspirations. Democratic ideas are important, and only Theory 1 mentions them.
So Theory 2 should surely stand as the jumping off point, not Theory 3, and Theory 1 is right to mention democracy.
Historically it is not easy to mark Ukraine on a map. Has Ukrainian nationalism has actually been supplied definite borders by the Russian incursion? British India broke up not on nationalist lines but religious ones - did the British Empire actually create the Indian nation?
Thank you for a very interesting analysis.
The USSR whatever its advertised structure, was an empire and Ukraine was one of its colonies - acquired by Catherine the Great.
????
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohdan_Khmelnytsky
Minor suggestion - get your basic facts straight before wading into discusson.
The economic-basis argument the author makes seems a little odd to me. If Russia was so much more successful economically than independent Ukraine (relatively, not in world terms), then how does economics support a motivation for Putin's present invasion of Ukraine?
Comments from an interested and not totally uninformed amateur.
Back to Part 1: The Maidan revolution was a revolt against a "legitimately" elected government? What kind of Russian English on the cue ball led to Yanukovych's election? Surely he was a Putin wingman, and his "subjects" wanted no part of Putin's program. So they revolted. Maybe the concept of legitimacy needs some deeper examination.
And the other countries that opted out of the post-Soviet "influence" sphere . . . most of them had experienced Russian domination off and on for decades to centuries and wanted no further part of it . . . so they ran to get under the NATO umbrella. Nationalism or just a desire to not be subjected to a certain continuation of the ruthless rule of Soviet Russia. Nationalism or personal protection on a communal scale? RIP John Mearsheimer.
Yanukovich was legitimately elected and was no sort of Putin's wingman. Moreover, he was not Putin's preferred candidate in 2010 - it was Timoshenko. Sure, Yanukovich was an unpleasant guy (and Putin always despised him), but his policy of getting noney from both sides was rather sensible for Ukraine.
Yeah, it was definitely a legitimate uprising (sarcasm):
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4048494
"The Maidan massacre trials and investigations have revealed various evidence that four killed and several dozen wounded policemen and at least the absolute majority of 49 killed and 157 wounded Maidan protesters were massacred on February 20, 2014 by snipers in Maidan-controlled buildings and areas. Such evidence includes testimonies of the absolute majority of wounded protesters, several dozens of prosecution witnesses, dozens of defense witnesses, and 14 self-admitted members of Maidan snipers groups. Videos presented at the trial showed that times of shooting of the absolute majority of protesters did not coincide with times of shooting by the Berkut policemen, who were charged with their massacre. Forensic medical examinations determined that the overwhelming majority of the protesters were shot from steep directions from the sides or the back. Initial ballistic examinations did not match bullets extracted from the bodies of killed and wounded protesters to the Berkut Kalashnikovs. Forensic examinations of the bullet holes by the government experts for the Maidan massacre trial suggested that Berkut policemen were shooting in the Hotel Ukraina snipers above the Maidan protesters and in trees and poles. The analysis shows cover-up and stonewalling of the investigations and trials by the Maidan governments and the far right. The prosecution denied that there were any snipers in the Maidan-controlled buildings. Not a single person is convicted or under arrest for the massacre of the protesters and the police almost 8 years after one of the most documented mass killings in history."