So we have a war, a war that lasts more than six months, a civil war, a war between one Ruthenian nation and another Ruthenian nation (don’t be fooled by the propagandists that these are two different nations!), a war in which external forces support one side to keep fighting. This is reminiscent of the wars in Yugoslavia, where the Croats and Bosniaks were constantly supported by the West, were constantly turned by the West against the Serbs, were constantly encouraged not to stop resisting the Serbs, to constantly irritate the Serbs, to reject peace solutions and to renege on peace agreements, if any had already been made. Both Croats and Bosnians and Serbs speak one and the same language. Never mind that. Somewhere it was decided that Yugoslavia was to cease to exist, that Yugoslavia must disintegrate. A strange resolve, strange especially in a world where globalisation is professed, where nationalisms are condemned, where huge political blocs are formed. Why did Yugoslavia have to break up in such a world? That is a good question! Especially since, the very next day, the states, or rather pseudo-states, that emerged on the ruins of Yugoslavia, nations that never wanted to live together with the Serbs, nations that wanted sovereignty at all costs, these same states or these same nations were more than happy to apply to become members of the European Union and…. to lose that longed-for, fought-for sovereignty! Do you understand any of this?
Yugoslavia was a dress rehearsal. The break-up of Yugoslavia happened between the peaceful break-up of the Soviet Union and the… planned – and, as it appears, non-peaceful – break-up of the Russian Federation. And yet it could have been quite different! Instead of war, we could have enjoyed peace and cooperation! Is this not what we dreamt of during the Cold War? Was it not then that we did not even dare to dream that the division between political East and political West could disappear in our lifetime?
Those of us who lived during the Soviet Union’s existence did not even imagine, did not even dare to suppose that the Soviet Union would cease to exist in their lifetime. The end of this enormous state, which had at its disposal a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, seemed inconceivable. Unless…. unless there was to be another world war, which nobody wanted.
And lo and behold, the seemingly impossible happened: a giant empire hoisted the white flag. The giant empire dissolved like a failed business, the giant empire went out of business like a dissolved sports club. The individual republics – members of this empire – filed for a no-fault divorce and received this divorce overnight. Everything went smoothly and was accompanied by great enthusiasm. Do we remember the song ‘Winds of Change’ sung by the Scorpions? This is what it was like at the time. It seemed that humanity was entering a new era, an era of peace and cooperation.
Why did the Soviet Union collapse? There are many more or less convincing explanations – the economic bankruptcy of the socialist system, the effective penetration of Western intelligence, reforms that escaped the control of the reformers – we will not cite them all here. We will only point to an extremely important factor, a psychological factor: the peoples of central and eastern Europe, and therefore also the Russians (as well as the Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Hungarians, etc.), have lived, are living and will continue to live nurturing a huge inferiority complex against the West. This inferiority complex did not arise when communism took hold in the countries of central and eastern Europe. No. It existed there from the cradle of these nations, from the dawn of their history. They all adopted civilisation from the West, their elites were educated in the West, they travelled to the West, they imitated Western styles in art and literature, they modelled their legal systems on Western legal systems and they learnt Western languages. In the languages of the above-mentioned nations, there is a huge proportion of words – and everyday words! at that – taken from French, Italian, German and English. These words came along with new technology or cultural currents, and were adopted and assimilated even though more often than not they had equivalents in their native languages. Foreign words in the mouths of central and eastern Europeans gave them social status.
This was also the case in the former Soviet republics. Communists or not, citizens of the Soviet Union all wanted to experience life as it appeared in the West: they wanted to drive the same cars, watch the same films and wear the same clothes as people in the West. This psychological factor was the most important weapon in the hands of the West in conquering, subjugating, subduing the said peoples. This factor was instrumental in causing the Soviet Union to fly the white flag; it was this factor that persuaded Mikhail Gorbachev to display an extremely soft attitude towards his Western partners, it was this factor that led Boris Yeltsin – like a schoolboy in front of his teacher – to report first to the American (rather than the Soviet!) president about the fact that he and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus had decided to dissolve the Soviet Union as a result of the talks held in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha; this factor led Boris Yeltsin, speaking in the American Congress, to utter the famous “God save America!” (Has any Western leader said anything similar and addressed it to Russia?)
Over the following years – not only under Boris Yeltsin, but also at least during Vladimir Putin’s first decade – Russia wanted to be part of the West, Russia sucked up to the West, Russia asked to be recognised as a partner by the West. And what?
Unfortunately, Western think tanks, Western politicians and Western elites drew only one conclusion, a conclusion that one draws when one acts from a position of strength, when one has the advantage over the opponent, when one underestimates the opponent. That conclusion was: the opponent is weak, the opponent surrenders himself to us: we brought about the collapse of the USSR, why not finish the job and bring about the collapse of the Russian Federation? Why not seize all those natural deposits hidden in Russian soil? Why not create a unipolar world? And it has begun!
Let us briefly recall:
[1] the expansion of NATO to include the former Warsaw Pact states (why? NATO was created against the USSR, the USSR ceased to exist, NATO not only did not cease to exist, it began to grow!);
[2] the constant stirring up of unrest in Russia’s autonomous republics (Chechnya) as well as around its borders (Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Belarus);
[3] dragging Ukraine (the most populous former republic of the USSR after Russia) into the western sphere of influence, pitting the Ukrainians against the Russians (as the Croats were once pitted against the Serbs), the staging of revolts in Kiev, including the overtly subversive presence of top US diplomats among the demonstrators, the conclusion of agreements (Minsk) and then reneging on them, and last but not least, the increasingly bold proposals to draw Ukraine into NATO (against whom?);
[4] the endless war over the Nord Stream pipeline and the constant breaking of disarmament agreements with the Russian Federation;
[5] the constant humiliation of Russia in the international arena, the use of Russians acting against their own state (whom the West has agreed to call dissidents because it sounds so nice), the burdening of Russia with sanctions and this particularly contrived humiliation – do we still remember this? – when at the Olympic Games Russian athletes were not allowed to perform under the national flag or listen (if they won) to the national anthem.
What was it all calculated for? To preserve peace? To build friendship between states and peoples?
And yet the West, if only it had not been greedy, if only it had been content with the goose that lays the golden eggs, if only it had not wanted to slaughter it, if only it had taken advantage of this Slavic inferiority complex and servility towards the West, from which the Ukrainians, the Russians and the rest of central and eastern Europe are suffering, this West could to this day have listened to the next Russian president saying in the US Congress, “God bless America!” The West could, to this day, milk the Russian cow with the help of its own global financial system, with the help of Russian oligarchs and Russian elites, who have always felt an incredible weakness towards everything Western. All this could have been skilfully exploited! It could! And now?
It may now turn out that a large part or all of Ukraine will fall under Moscow’s influence, that Russia, together with China, will overthrow the dollar’s reign over the world, that a large proportion of Russians – despite the admiration for the West they acquired in their cradle – will become hostile to the West. To think of it! According to their natural or acquired inclination, they could have gone on being at the service of Washington, London, Paris and Berlin! Eh, all those notorious think tanks have failed miserably! Greed, conceit and simply incredible stupidity prevailed (yes, the think tanks turned out to be tanks full of fools!). Well, since the dawn of time, the few wise representatives of mankind have discovered this peculiar affliction of man, which brings him down every now and then. The Greek story teller Aesop (his short fables are worth more than lengthy analyses of think tanks, really!) described this affliction succinctly with the words: Much wants more and loses all.
