The Eternal Suspicions of the Soviet Mind-Set

NY Times ^ | December 9, 2004 | SERGE SCHMEMANN

[neverdem]

EDITORIAL OBSERVER

MOSCOW

Trying to decipher what on earth Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine is keeping Moscow's embattled liberals very busy these days. Why would a president who worked so hard on his standing in the West squander what's left on a confrontation in which he has nothing to gain?

Some say he has fallen under the sway of anti-Western fellow alumni of the K.G.B., who dominate his entourage. Others say that for all his Western manners, he fully shares the venerable Russian perception of Ukraine as an extension of Russia. Still others say he really believes that the West is orchestrating Viktor Yushchenko's rise as part of a continuing yearning to encircle Russia.

Most likely, there's something to these conjectures. Many of the men and women who wield power in Russia - especially former K.G.B. operatives like Mr. Putin - have inherited a Soviet mentality that considers politics to be a naked struggle for power. The notion that Ukrainians might actually want a say in who rules them would not dawn on this group; it presumes that no Ukrainians would be so insubordinate unless anti-Soviet (make that anti-Russian) forces were behind them.

These instincts could clearly be seen through the lines in an interview Mr. Putin gave the other day. "I don't want there to be a division, as there was in Germany, between westerners and easterners, people of a first and second category," he said. "People of the first category are allowed to live according to stable democratic laws, while people of a, let us say, dark political color of skin will be instructed by a strict man in a colonial helmet on the political understandings by which they must live. And if the natives resist, they'll be punished with a bomb-and-rocket club, as they were in Belgrade."

The notion that people from the East are patronized as a lower order by the West is a powerful source of resentment in Russia. It is the major reason Mr. Putin and the Parliament have felt compelled to "protect" Russian enclaves in Moldova, Georgia and now Ukraine.

There is plenty to feed that perception. All the debates around the expansions of NATO and the European Union, or around American bases in Central Asia or the "rose revolution" in Georgia, are full of talk about constraining Russia's imperial ambitions, or weaning former Soviet republics and satellites from the Kremlin. The United States has campaigned for oil pipelines that skirt Russia. New European Union members talk of making Ukraine a buffer between them and Russia.

Russians have historically felt proprietary about Ukraine. Though the agrarian west is ardently nationalist, predominantly Catholic and anti-Russian, the industrial south and east are predominantly oriented toward Russia in speech and religion. The eastern Ukraine of Soviet days was largely indistinguishable from Russia. Many Soviet leaders - Leonid Brezhnev, for example - came from Ukraine.

Yet those points cannot fully explain why Mr. Putin has treated the Ukrainian election as if it were a last stand against a Western invasion. Under any president, Ukraine will depend heavily on Russian energy and Russian trade, while seeking trade and contact with Europe.

Mr. Yushchenko, the candidate of western Ukrainians, is himself from eastern Ukraine and served as prime minister under the outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, who is supported by Mr. Putin. He is certainly no American stooge. He opposes, for example, the use of Ukrainian troops in Iraq. As president, he would probably make overtures to the east and to Moscow to avoid a national split.

The real contest is not so much between East and West, but between a corrupt regime supported by capitalist gangsters, as represented by Mr. Kuchma and his candidate, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, and a relatively fresher and apparently more democratic opposition. That, we hope, is what drew so many Ukrainians into the streets when the government blatantly stole the election for Mr. Yanukovich.

The fear that the peaceful uprising may prove contagious may be another reason the Kremlin is so keen to prevent a Yushchenko victory.

"Russian authorities are defending not only a bankrupt nomenklatura-oligarch regime in Ukraine, but also themselves," said Grigory Yavlinsky, head of the liberal Yabloko Party. Mr. Putin knows how that works: his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, engineered the dissolution of the Soviet Union in order to oust Mikhail Gorbachev, then made sure to install Mr. Putin before bowing out.

It did not work in Ukraine. Mr. Putin's crude pressure probably served only to raise Mr. Yushchenko's profile. Mr. Kuchma has backed away from a greater confrontation, and the Ukrainian Supreme Court, hardly a dissident bunch, has given the protests the highest legitimacy.

If Mr. Yushchenko wins on the next ballot, Mr. Putin's main problem may be to find a way to back off without losing too much face - unless he's prepared to use force, and Mr. Putin has given no sign of that.

Helping Mr. Putin save face could be the next challenge for Mr. Yushchenko and his followers, and for the West. Whatever they may think of the Russian president's increasingly authoritarian ways, he remains enormously popular and in no danger of being toppled by a rose revolution. Turning Ukraine's elections into a humiliating defeat could push him, and his constituents, further into a xenophobic funk. History suggests that would not be in Ukraine's interests, nor in the West's.

[Odyssey-x]

Turning Ukraine's elections into a humiliating defeat could push him, and his constituents, further into a xenophobic funk. History suggests that would not be in Ukraine's interests, nor in the West's.

So undemocratically installing Putin's puppet in Ukraine would be in the Ukraine's best interest? According to whom?

[EagleUSA]

I am afraid that when we are looking at Putin, we are looking at old-line KGB, old Russian mentality. Absolute control, as opposed to democracy. It is much easier to roll a tank over a dissenter, as opposed to governing him under a common democracy and set of laws.

[GSlob]

"Helping Mr. Putin save face could be the next challenge..."
It's more like a derriere than a face. Why bother helping to save it? It is his derriere.

[nw_arizona_granny]

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