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发表于 2015-2-13 22:23
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[转帖] What Putin’s Favorite Guru Tells Us About His Next Target
In a ceremony at the Kremlin in June 2007, Vladmir Putin awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation—the highest award in Russia—to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose brave exposure of Soviet oppression during the Cold War had made him a revered figure in the West. Both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had tried to do give Solzhenitsyn the same prize for the Gulag Archipelago and other famed works but the writer didn’t have much use for them—two leaders who tried to break with the communist and imperialist identity of Russia. Putin was different. Putin, Solzhenitsyn said in an interview shortly before his death in 2007 at age 88, had brought “a slow and gradual restoration” to Russia.
The admiration was mutual. After praising Solzhenitzyn at the Kremlin ceremony for devoting “practically all his life to the Fatherland,” Putin visited the writer at home, telling him how much of his program for Russia was “largely in tune with what Solzhenitsyn has written.” And recent political developments show that Putin indeed has followed many of Solzhenitsyn’s ideas, particularly in the area known as “the near abroad,” or the former USSR.
Indeed, it is one of history’s ironies that the No. 1 internal enemy of the Soviet Union has now become a spiritual guru to a former KGB officer who repeatedly voices nostalgia for Soviet times. For years before his death, the fiercely nationalistic Solzhenitsyn suggested that post-Soviet Russia must include Ukraine. Solzhenitsyn did not see the Ukrainians as a separate nation: “All the talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since something like the ninth century and possessing its own non-Russian language is recently invented falsehood,” he wrote in a 1990 essay, “Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals.”
Putin likewise sees Ukraine as an artificial state: At the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, he told then-President George W. Bush that “Ukraine is not even a state. Part of its territory is in Eastern Europe and the greater part is a gift from us."
Today, with the world’s attention focused on Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, we might look to Solzhenitsyn’s writings for a clue as to where Putin’s next aggressive move might be: Kazakhstan. Solzhenitsyn saw Kazakhstan in the same light as Ukraine, suggesting that it was not really a separate state and that much of its territory is historically Russian. “Its present huge territory was stitched together by the communists in a completely haphazard fashion: wherever migrating herds made a yearly passage would be called Kazakhstan,” he wrote in his essay. “Today the Kazakhs constitute noticeably less than half the population of the entire inflated territory of Kazakhstan.”
Putin has taken a similar tack toward Kazakhstan publicly. He managed to insult the Kazakhs in the midst of the Ukrainian crisis by saying that their president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, had “created a state on a territory where no state had ever existed.”
Kazakhstan, like Ukraine, has a large Russian population, and as in Ukraine, Russian nationalists view parts of Kazakhstan as Russian land. Kazakhstan, Solzhenitsyn wrote: “had been assembled from southern Siberia and the southern Ural region, plus the sparsely populated central areas which had since that time been transformed and built up by Russians, by inmates of forced-labor camps, and by exiled peoples.”
A passionate patriot as well as a champion of free speech, Solzhenitsyn left a rich, diverse, and controversial legacy. Putin chooses to follow only those ideas that fit his neo-imperialist and reactionary agenda, and naturally they don’t usually include the free-speech part. But Solzhenityzn the nationalist he loves. In December 2014, speaking in the Kremlin about Western sanctions, Putin quoted Solzhenitsyn as saying: "It is time to defend Russia, otherwise they will cow us completely."
In his 1990 essay, written on the eve of the fall of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn suggested that Russia abandon its global agenda and focus, instead, on its internal problems. He called for the immediate separation of Russia from the Soviet Union—a call that was heard by the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who in December of 1991 signed the Belavezh Accords with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and the head of Belarusian parliament, Stanislau Shushkevich, thus hammering the last nail in the coffin of the USSR and leaving Mikhail Gorbachev without a job.
Yet in the same essay, Solzhenitsyn wrote that “the word “Russian” had for centuries embraced Little Russian [Ukrainians], Great Russians, and Belorussians.”He accepted the potential future independence of Ukraine but added: “The area is very heterogenous indeed, and only the local population can determine the fate of a particular locality”–advice that Putin appeared to take to heart in his annexation of Crimea and is currently pursuing in Eastern Ukraine.
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Located in the center of Eurasia, Kazakhstan covers a territory larger than Western Europe. It is rich in natural and human resources and, unlike some other post-Soviet states, has maintained relative peace and stability. This is largely due to the political efforts of Nazarbaev, the country’s autocratic ruler, who has demonstrated Machiavellian skills in suppressing the opposition and appeasing external foes. Nazarbaev has been very careful with Putin but the seeds for a future dispute—either political or military—have been planted. Concerned with Russia’s neo-imperialist policies conducted under the pretext of defending the Russkii Mir (the Russian World), the Kazakhs may eventually turn away from Russia, particularly when the era of Nazarbaev ends.
No doubt this will have political consequences, possibly envolving a military conflict similar to what is happening in Ukraine, where after his annexation of Crimea Putin supplied and funded pro-Russian separatists in the east.
Putin also seems to echo Solzhenitsyn in his distaste for the West and its mores. In 1978 in a famous speech at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn criticized Western civilization for a lack of courage, its unrestained freedom of media, and its fixation on law and individual rights. The withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Vietnam, according to the Nobel Prize Laureate, was a sign of weakness: “To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.” Solzhenitsyn even passed harsh judgment on the Western concept of the rule of law, no doubt pleasing Russia’s future leader: “Legal frames, especially in the United States, are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes… The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society.”
In spite of his abhorrence of Soviet system, Solzhenitsyn also recommended that Russia not follow the Western path: “Should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively… The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization forever.”
This reactionary agenda has been meticulously followed by Vladimir Putin.
Peter Eltsov is senior research fellow and associate professor at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University. The views expressed here are his own and may not correspond with the views of the National Defense University.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/vladimir-putin-guru-solzhenitsyn-115088.html#ixzz3RdRQm3fK
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/vladimir-putin-guru-solzhenitsyn-115088.html#.VN4JL039nIU |
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发表于 2015-2-13 22:47
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