Friday 29th of March 2024

happy 90th, gorby...

gorbygorby

Mikhail Gorbachev is 90. America also needs its own perestroika

 

During the recent years, the number of Russian people who believe that the first and last president of the USSR has done more harm than good to the country has slightly decreased. The number of those who positively assess Gorbachev's input has increased by one percent.

 

A poll conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre among 1,600 Russians revealed that the number of people who believe that Gorbachev brought the country more harm than good has decreased. In 2019, 54 percent of respondents thought so, and in 2021 - 51 percent.

 

The number of Russians who are confident that the harm and benefit from Gorbachev's activities were approximately equal has not changed in two years. As many as 32 percent of respondents share this point of view. Fifty-one percent of respondents believe that Gorbachev cared primarily about the welfare of the country and the people, but made a number of mistakes that led to shocks (50% of respondents thought so in 2019). The number of Russians who consider Gorbachev a criminal who deliberately destroyed the state has decreased: 26 percent in 2019 vs. 22 percent in 2021.

 

Eleven percent of respondents said that Gorbachev was a brave man who was not afraid to take responsibility for the reforms the country needed. Two years earlier, ten percent of respondents thought so.

 

The Russians find glasnost and freedom of speech (9%), perestroika (4%) and the development of international relations (3%) as Gorbachev's achievements. As for the main failures of Gorbachev's policy, the respondents named the collapse of the USSR (36%), actions in the interests of the West (7%), and economic decline (7%).

On March 2, Mikhail Gorbachev celebrates his 90th birthday. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin congratulated him on the anniversary. Putin called Gorbachev an outstanding political figure who changed the course of world history.

 

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Angela Merkel also sent their congratulations to the ex-president of the USSR. The head of the German government thanked Gorbachev for his contribution to uniting Germany and ending the Cold War.

 

Mikhail Gorbachev and his perestroika

 

"[The main achievement of the political career] is perestroika. And everything that is related to it. It was cut short, it was not brought to the end ... Freedom, glasnost, freedom to travel abroad, freedom of religion. (...) Finally, weapons. People could take a deep breath of relief. After all, people all over the world, especially in the developed world, in Europe and in America, they have been digging shelters to protect themselves from a nuclear war, which could break out at any moment."

 

"How much did our perestroika and new thinking save? Hundreds of billions of dollars for the rest of the world! " (from a conversation with the State Secretary of the Ministry of Finance of the Federal Republic of Germany Horst Koehler, 1991).

 

"America also needs its own perestroika."

 

"The collapse of the Soviet Union, its withdrawal from the world political arena immediately changed the state of affairs and the balance of power in the whole world, and many were tempted to fish in troubled waters. Everyone is to blame for the fact that the world could not take advantage of the chances that perestroika, new thinking, the end of the Cold War opened up."

 

"Here, how did Yeltsin act? He negotiated with me and signed papers, but he was going behind my back. He did some mean things, and I cannot forgive him for that. Even now, he is dead, and I would not like to talk about it, but what a vile person he turned out to be. And I was promoting him. Man he is my mistake. His meanness probably comes from drunkenness. Generally speaking, he was a bad man. Lord, forgive me, and workers, forgive me."

 

 

Читайте больше на https://english.pravda.ru/society/147340-gorbachev/

 

geopolitics 101...

Suppose China formed a provocative alliance with Mexico and began building military bases and stationing troops near the U.S. southern border. Now suppose it lured Cuba also into its new hemispheric alliance and imperiled U.S. control over its Guantanamo naval base on that island. What would happen? Almost inevitably, the result would be war because America would never allow such a potentially hostile entrenchment within its sphere of influence.

That’s essentially the question Russia faces as America and NATO continue to flirt with the notion of pulling Ukraine into the Atlantic alliance (and Georgia too when circumstances seem right). And Russia’s answer is essentially the same: It will not allow that to happen. Any nation has a fundamental need to fend off potential threats from within its neighborhood and hence to maintain protective spheres of influence. The University of Chicago’s John J. Mearsheimer calls this “Geopolitics 101.”

Yet America’s foreign policy leaders seem to have skipped that class. Not surprisingly, President Biden has slipped right into lockstep with his predecessors since taking office, declaring what America will and will not accept within Russia’s sphere of influence, where U.S. meddling has been a hallmark policy for years. Speaking on the seventh anniversary of Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, Biden declared, “The United States does not, and will never, recognize Russia’s purported annexation of the peninsula, and we will stand with Ukraine against Russia’s aggressive acts. We will continue to work to hold Russia accountable for its abuses and aggression in Ukraine.”

Biden’s statement demonstrates just how thick-headed our leaders can be when it comes to dealing with Russia, how resistant they often are to stepping back and contemplating the geopolitical realities involved. He is not alone. This tendency toward thick-headedness goes back a lot of years.

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia, William J. Burns (slated to be Biden’s CIA director), recounts in his memoir the George W. Bush administration’s efforts in 2008 to pave the way for Ukraine and Georgia to become NATO members. Burns reveals that he warned his superiors in Washington that such efforts would stir Russian President Vladimir Putin to “veto that effort”—as Harvard professor Graham Allison once described Burns’s cable—“by using Russian troops or other forms of meddling to splinter both countries.” In other words, Geopolitics 101 would apply.

Two months before Bush ignored that guidance and orchestrated a NATO communique vowing eventual alliance membership for both Georgia and Ukraine, Burns reiterated his warning that “today’s Russia will respond. The prospect of subsequent Russian-Georgian armed conflict would be high.” He added it also would “create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.”

Burns turned out to be prescient. Within months, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, bent on NATO membership and thinking Bush had his back, took action to reincorporate two breakaway regions with strong Russian ties, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. When fighting broke out between Georgia and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of both regions. Once again, Geopolitics 101 prevailed. But the obvious lesson for America and the West—that they should cease meddling inside Russia’s traditional sphere of influence—didn’t gain any significant sway within Atlantic Alliance councils.

Five years later, events in Ukraine demonstrated even more starkly the lessons of Geopolitics 101. America sought to use economic inducements to wrest that tragically split country away from Russian influence and into the Western orbit. One U.S. foreign policy official estimated with considerable pride that the United States invested some $5 billion in efforts to sway Ukrainian public opinion and the nation’s foreign policy direction. American “NGOs,” meanwhile, had been funneling money and counsel to opposition leaders for years. Thus it wasn’t surprising that, when Ukraine’s duly elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, spurned the Western offer in favor of a more generous Russian entreaty, anti-government street demonstrations ensued that lasted three months and claimed nearly a hundred lives.

Negotiations between the government and pro-Western dissidents yielded an accommodation that allowed Yanukovych to remain in power until new elections could be held, but it fell apart amidst a surge of violence from the dissidents. The result was a coup. Yanukovych fled for his life, and a new pro-Western government, which included neofascist elements, took control of the country. No one could argue that the United States didn’t play a significant role in unleashing and fostering these events.

All this posed a powerful crisis for Russia. Large parts of eastern Ukraine were populated by ethnic Russians who spoke Russian and favored continued Russian ties over any thrust to the West imposed by Kiev. Then there was Crimea, where ethnic Russians composed some 60 percent of the population and which was home to Russia’s crucial naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Based on the fate of the ethnic Russians of eastern Ukraine and on its own strategic interests in its immediate region, Russia had reasons to act.

But its most crucial interest was in preventing Ukrainian entry into NATO. The prospect of hostile Western forces pushing right up to Russia’s southwestern border and posing an immediate sphere-of-interest threat was the kind that no nation could accept. And so, Putin did what was entirely predictable—and predicted. First, he annexed Crimea (desired by a large majority of the people there). Next, he made clear to the new government in Kiev that he would never allow it to become a Western stronghold on Russia’s front porch. Then, he provided extensive aide—military, financial, and diplomatic—to Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine engaged in the Ukrainian civil war that ensued after the coup. And finally, he massed a large army on the Ukrainian border as an ongoing threat of what would happen if the country’s eastern separatists came under any fearsome attack from Kiev.

All this of course has stirred torrents of outraged screams from those in America who insist Putin is the aggressor and that all America wants is world peace under the soft and benign hegemony it has practiced so benevolently over the past 75 years. Biden’s statement on Crimea is consistent with that sensibility. But Josef Joffe, the newspaper editor and academic, took a different view back in 2014 when he wrote a Wall Street Journal piece purporting to be a letter from Niccolo Machiavelli to Putin. “You did everything right,” says the imaginary Machiavelli to the real Putin. “You grabbed an opportunity when you saw it,” and demonstrated a capacity for being “both ruthless and prudent.” As Joffe summed up, Putin calculated what he could get away with, got away with it, and avoided actions that could destabilize the situation beyond the havoc already generated.

One tenet of realism in foreign policy is that nations should always understand and appreciate the fundamental interests of other nations because that will inform efforts to predict the reaction of those other nations to threats and jabs. Sometimes the fundamental interests of nations clash in ways that make hostility, even war, inevitable. But when nations exacerbate tensions with adversarial powers whose stakes are immense in comparison to their own less crucial interests, usually the driving force is ideology or ignorance. Regarding Biden’s declaration on Russia and Crimea, the driving force seems to be a combination of the two.

 

Robert W. Merry, former Wall Street Journal Washington correspondent and Congressional Quarterly CEO, is the author of five books on American history and foreign policy.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-russian-class-in-geopolitics-101/

the moral neighbourhood...

 

The collapse of the Soviet Union was not caused by the controversial policy of perestroika but should actually be blamed on the attempted coup in August 1991 and a conspiracy between the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

That’s according to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who wrote an article for ‘Russia in Global Affairs’ explaining his point of view that perestroika was “historically correct” and necessary for the USSR.

Gorbachev led the Soviet Union from 1985 until its collapse in 1991 and is seen as one of the most important figures of 20th-century history. However, while he enjoys a positive reputation outside of the country, he is viewed differently inside Russia. Many people blame him for the post-Soviet economic crisis that led to a dramatic decline in living standards, as well as a diminution of Moscow’s status on the world stage.

Perestroika, seen by some as a significant contributing factor in the dissolution of the USSR, was an attempt to restructure the economic system and end stagnation. As part of the policy, Gorbachev introduced market-like reforms into the socialist system, which lead to food shortages and political tensions.

 

However, according to Gorbachev, those who believe perestroika wasn’t necessary have a very short memory.

“They have either forgotten or don’t want to remember what the moral and psychological situation in Soviet society was like by 1985,” he explained. “People were clamoring for change. Everyone – both leaders and ordinary citizens – felt that something was wrong with the country. The country was sinking deeper into stagnation. Economic growth had virtually stopped.”

“Perestroika was aimed at people. Its goal was to liberate a person, to make him the master of his own destiny, of his country,” he said.

However, despite his conviction that the policy was correct, he did note that he would have done “a lot of things differently.”

In Gorbachev’s opinion, the real reason for the fall of the Soviet Union was insubordination within the ranks of the Communist Party.

“Two blows proved fatal for perestroika,” he explained. “The attempted coup d’etat organized by reactionary forces, including those from my entourage, in August 1991, and the December collusion of the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, which ended the centuries-old history of our state.”

In particular, he pointed the finger at Boris Yeltsin, who was the leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and who promised that a union of some sort would survive. However, according to the former Soviet leader, the heads of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus got together and opted to destroy the country.

“Yeltsin did not keep his word,” Gorbachev wrote. “He and his entourage sacrificed the Union to an unstoppable desire to reign in the Kremlin.”

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/russia/531136-ussr-collapse-perestroika-gorbachev/

 

MEANWHILE:

 

The Putin Doctrine? How the ideas of a 20th century thinker ostracized by the Soviets help to shape Russia’s new foreign policy

 

By Piotr Dutkiewicz, a member of the Valdai Club Academic Council and Director of the Center for Governance and Public Policy at Carleton University, Canada.

 

In recent years, Vladimir Putin has mentioned several times the ideas of Lev Gumilev – one of the fathers of modern Eurasianism – in the context of the roles of civilization and cultural factors in Russian domestic politics.

In an article ostensibly about Ukraine, published last week, the Russian president expanded Gumilev’s initial argument, outlining what we might now call Putin’s Civilizational Doctrine in International Relations.

Before analyzing this doctrine’s key points and potential international consequences, let me take a step back to briefly trace its roots. Why Gumilev, and why now?

Lev Gumilev was the son of Russian literary icon Anna Akhmatova and Nikolay Gumilev, a tsarist officer and poet. He became a prominent social geographer, ethnographer, and anthropologist whose work focused on the role of culture, history, geography, and spirituality in the process of the formation of the Russian nation. He was an exponent of Russian uniqueness and greatness.

Such thoughts were not popular with the leaders of the multinational Soviet Union and the authorities rejected his ideas, while banning most of his texts from publication. However, he finally attracted mainstream public attention during the Perestroika years, in the late 1980s.

Being a unique civilization does not, according to Gumilev, preclude the acceptance of either European values or political multipolarity. His views provide a template, as British journalist Charles Clover has argued in the Financial Times, “for a synthesis of nationalism and internationalism that could form the founding idea of a new Eurasia, a singular political unit enjoying much the same frontiers as the USSR.”Gumilev’s Russia has its own great destiny but should be open to inter-civilizational dialogue. This standsin stark contrast to some more extreme and closed versions of neo-Eurasianism. 

For a conservative politician like Vladimir Putin, leading Russia during a period of worldwide turbulence, Gumilev’s mix of cultural and spiritual-based prophesy of Russian greatness has served as a good foundation for Putin to suggest that the civilizational uniqueness of Russia can be used in not only the domestic but also the international agenda. Thus, Putin proposed that Russian civilization can become a frame of reference for relations with neighboring countries.

In other words, he has proposed that history, culture, and faith are de facto fundamental alternative bonds that unite Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in addition, alternation, or even contrary to the level of state-to-state relations.

Basically, Putin put forward four propositions. First, he acknowledged that history matters a lot in international relations, as “Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe,” creating a very strong unifying foundation for their statehood and nation-building. Secondly, the fact Russian civilization embraced simultaneously three nations and Soviet policies disrupted that: “[…] Soviet national policy secured at the state level the provision on three separate Slavic peoples: Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian, instead of the large Russian nation, a triune people comprising Velikorussians, Malorussians and Belorussians.” Thirdly, he argued that […] modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era: “We know,” writes Putin, “and remember well that it was shaped – for a significant part – on the lands of historical Russia.” Finally, he proposed that cultural, spiritual and historical unity is disrupted by the current Ukrainian political elites.

 

I will leave it for the historians, anthropologists, and sociologists to discuss Putin’s historical claims about past relations between Russia and Ukraine, and I am sure his arguments will stir a lot of heated debate among them.

But what is most interesting from an international relations perspective are the ideas that form the foundation of Putin’s new Russian IR doctrine, which treats civilization as a potent frame of reference in inter-state relations. In the cases of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, cultures may exceed other formal associations. “Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians,” writes Putin, “are [all] the heirs of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe.” The suggestion here is that civilizational bonds might be more stable, deeper, and even more human than inter-governmental relations based on national interests and intermediated by the three countries’ current political leadership.

Putin’s article opens at least four interconnected avenues for interpretation of how Russia may behave internationally and structure her relations with the immediate neighborhood.

It may signal that Russia is joining other powerful actors like China, India, Iran, and other “revisionist states” in viewing world politics as entering a new era defined by the multiplicity of cultural and civilizational discourses, in which civilization becomes one of the crucial elements in the new structure of international relations (in addition to states, international organizations and law, and regional/global social movements).

 

It may suggest that the Russian leader believes that the long period of the last three centuries in which the West has been a dominant economic, cultural, and political force is not only ending but is being replaced by a new paradigm. This paradigm features the emergence of the civilizational model of international relations and regional dialogue, in which cultural/civilizational similarities and differences will possibly influence global patterns of collaboration, confrontation, and dependence.

It also may mean that in the world of civilizations, some smaller- and mid-sized states (like Belarus or Ukraine) will have to make crucial choices that may reshape the current form of geopolitics based on power relations to fit a model based on adherence to a regionally or globally dominant civilization.

Given that civilizations are becoming an essential element of global politics, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus will need to square the circle between rational and cultural/spiritual factors that influence the evolving inter-state dialogue with Ukraine and Belarus. This need arises because civilizations encompass religious, cultural, subconscious, and historical considerations – as described by Putin’s paper – that may become an important factor in the political decision-making. Civilization rests on its participants’ faith in joining a specific stream of history. While the final historical destination is unclear, an embedded sense of belonging forms the base upon which members of a civilization ground their sense of purpose 1. So, the choice of being together or separate (in the case of Ukraine and Belarus) is mostly the choice of the people rather than the political establishment of the day.

It remains to be seen whether Putin’s intention was to outline a framework for a coherent civilization-based approach – a doctrine of international relations – that starts with Ukraine and Belarus and will then be applied to other countries. For now, his article has provided us with a lot to think about when it comes to the shift in Russia’s framing of her approach to the immediate neighborhood.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/russia/529651-putin-doctrine-foreign-policy/

 

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