Matthew Kaninski
Wall street Journal
August 19, 2008
The sight of Russian tanks rolling through Georgia was shocking yet
familiar. Images flash back of Chechnya in 1994 and '99, Vilnius '91,
Afghanistan '79, Prague '68, Hungary '56. Before that the Soviet
invasions, courtesy of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, of Poland and the
Baltics in '39 and '40. Kazaks, Azeris, Tajiks, Ukrainians remember --
from family stories and national lore -- their own subjugation to
Russian rule.
Other empires such as Britain and France adjusted, not without
difficulty, to the fall of their distant domains. Far more of Russia's
essence is tied up in the Imperium, and it barely tried to find a new
identity after the Soviet Union fell. The war in Georgia marks an easy
return to territorial expansion (here Moscow has taken chunks of
Georgia for itself) and attempted regional dominance.
Russia is a relatively young nation, dating from after the turn of the
previous millennium. Drive the highway from Gori to Tbilisi and you'll
find signs of Christianity that predate Russia by some five centuries.
Georgians will tell you, with a mixture of pride and scorn, that their
culture and history goes back a lot deeper than Russia's.
Starting out as an isolated village, Muscovy grew by conquest,
swallowing up lands and people at a dizzying rate, especially from the
18th century on. Though Russian nationalists claim otherwise, as a
nation the Russians are a mix of Slavic, Asian and other European
ethnicities. This national hodgepodge was wrenched together by an
authoritarian czar who claimed his right to rule from the heavens.
The Soviets were even better empire builders. Vladimir Putin, whose
formative years were spent in Dresden spying on the East German
colonials, comes from this tradition.
Never in the history of empire was the periphery generally so much more
advanced than the center. With each move into Europe, from the
partitions of Poland to Stalin's great triumph at Yalta, Russia
acquired what it didn't have -- an industrialized economic base, better
infrastructure and above all contact with Western civilization. Aside
from St. Petersburg and a few other towns, Russia itself stayed a
largely rural, Eastern Orthodox backwater. It knew it too.
In the Soviet days, Russian culture, language and history were pressed
on its captive nations. But these nations in and outside the U.S.S.R.
never gave up their dreams of freedom. Starting in the Baltics, and
then spreading to the Caucasus and Ukraine, their resurgence was, as
much if not more than Mikhail Gorbachev, the internal force that
brought about the Soviet Union's collapse. They easily imagined life
without Mother Russia. Russia could not reciprocate. To dominate is to
be.
Boris Yeltsin tried to give Russians an alternative narrative. For his
own political survival he had to stoke a Russian reawakening against
the Soviet behemoth. After leading the charge against the 1991 putsch,
Yeltsin put forward democracy as a unifying and legitimizing idea for
the new Russian state. But that went up in smoke with the shelling of
the Russian parliament in 1993, the first Chechen war and the rise of
the oligarchs.
Yeltsinism was fully discredited by the time Vladimir Putin took over.
He doesn't give the impression he ever believed in its main precepts of
partnership with the West and freedom at home. For a while, Mr. Putin
pushed some economic modernization, including cleaning up the tax code.
His instinct, however, led him toward the past. The so-called
humiliations of the Yeltsin era, which to most Westerners who lived
there then looks like a golden era of relative normalcy, called for
vengeance. The young democracies around Russia that chose a future in
the West were to be forced back into Moscow's sphere of influence.
It is curious to hear Russia invoke the Kosovo precedent to justify its
invasion of Georgia. There is an unintended parallel. Two former
communist apparatchiks (Mr. Putin and Slobodan Milosevic) took over
weakened, demoralized countries and thought expansionist nationalism
would lead them to glory.
The second Chechen war consolidated the Putin hold on power in 1999 --
as stirring up the Serbs in Kosovo did for Milosevic in the late 1980s.
The Serbs were then like the Russians are today. A European nation,
though somewhat set apart by Orthodox Christianity, that opts out of
the Western mainstream. This choice, alas, requires victims like Kosovo
Albanians or Georgians -- small nations whose fate the outside world
might ignore.
The images from Georgia brought me back to a late May evening 12 years
ago in Murmansk, the seat of Russia's Northern Fleet. There ahead of
elections, I'd met a smart and amiable teacher in the Russian Arctic
city who, true to his nation's reputation for hospitality, invited me
home for vodka and some dinner.
Hours into our meeting I'd mentioned that perhaps Russia, then looking
for its place, might aspire to become something like prosperous Norway
just across the border from Murmansk -- a country able to provide its
people a good life. It stopped him cold. In this grim setting, my new
friend spat in disgust and said, "Russia is no Norway. It is a great
power. It is destined to be great." Mr. Putin would doubtless agree.
Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
