Wars make
nations
There has
been a lot of commentary in our mainstream media about how the war with Russia
that began on 24 February 2022 has forged a nation in Ukraine with a common
identity under the brilliant leadership of President Zelensky. This nation
found self-confidence in its seeming ability to withstand an armed invasion by
the powerful neighbor to the east and even to strike back with success measured
in large territorial gains in the Kharkov oblast first, and then in the Kherson
oblast. Hardships have been shared. Dreams of victory maintain a buoyant mood,
we are told.
That one
quarter of the Ukrainian population has now fled the country is not discussed.
I am counting here not just those who fled to the West but those who fled to
Russia. And why should the significance
of this be discussed? One quarter of the
population of all three Baltic States, one quarter of Romanians and Bulgarians
also fled their countries as from the early 1990s when they experienced
economic ruin following the breaking of ties with Russia and attempted,
unsuccessfully at first, to integrate into the European markets. That
Ukrainians are fleeing military action whereas the others I have named were
economic refugees, the end result for the residual populations and their re-constituted
nation states is the same: a kind of self-inflicted ethnic cleansing and
concentration of the more “loyal” strata of the population in the nations that
emerged from the crisis.
Meanwhile
no observations about nation-building have been made with regard to Russia
since the start of the Special Military Operation. That should come as no surprise, given that
our experts in American and European universities and in think tanks have transitioned
away from being Russian studies centers, which is how they were set up and
financed as from the beginning of the Cold War in 1949. The Harriman Institute at Columbia University
and the Davis Center (formerly, the Russian Research Center) at Harvard have
become Ukrainian study centers in all but name. No matter that at Harvard they
already had a properly designated and separately sponsored Ukrainian Center
dating from the 1970s. University administrators follow the money and the
professorate goes along for the ride.
However, studies
of the emerging Ukrainian nation will have a near term “sell by” date. This
nation run by ultranationalists is doomed by the coming defeat on the
battlefield and removal from power of those who have led the nation building
exercise down the wrong road of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Meanwhile, the
New Russia that is also being shaped by the challenges of all out war will be
with us for a long time to come. We will see it in the shifting geopolitical
and military balance of forces globally. I would advise our scholars in the
United States and Europe to rethink what they are doing with their time if they
are to have any relevance to future political decision-making.
In what
follows, I will sketch several areas of particular interest in the
transformation I see in Russian society, the economy, and international posture
as a New Russia is forged by war.
*****
The consolidation
of Russian society is a much discussed topic these days on Russian talk shows.
One dimension of this has been the political cleansing, the voluntary departure
or removal of the 1990s vintage West-loving Liberals who, to a large degree,
despised their fellow citizens and, whenever possible, spent their free time in
Europe or the States.
One of the
leading voluntary exiles who left the country just ahead of warrants to appear
in court to face corruption charges was Anatoly Chubais, who had built his fame
or infamy in the 1990s as a director of the privatization programs that helped
to create the circle of so-called oligarchs that dominated Russian political
life until they were tamed, imprisoned or expelled by President Putin early in
the new millennium. There were, of course, hundreds and thousands of lesser
devils who have been a counterweight to the forces of patriotism through the
entire Putin presidency.
These
anti-Putin personalities have enjoyed untouchable status in such institutions
as the Higher School of Economics in Moscow or the Yeltsin Center in
Yekaterinburg.
The latter
has been under attack for several years by Russian film director and political commentator
Nikita Mikhalkov on his own television program Besogon. Mikhalkov denounced the Yeltsin Center for disseminating treasonous propaganda and
for collusion with the American consulate in Yekaterinburg.
The Yeltsin
Center exists under the patronage of Yeltsin’s widow, Naina, and she, like
Mayor Anatoly Sobchak’s widow and daughter as well as other odious figures from
Boris Nikolayevich’s time in power, has enjoyed the personal protection of
Putin. Unlike Western leaders, Vladimir Putin has never gone back on his word,
and protection of ‘The Family’ was part of the deal which gave him the
presidency in 1999.
Going back
18 months or so, Mikhalkov’s program was taken off the air. It would be safe to
say that his remarks on the Yeltsin Center were a major factor in this
political decision from on high.
However, today Mikhalkov has been restored to a place of honor. You can
find his recent broadcasts of Besogon on youtube. His thinking has been taken
up by Vladimir Solovyov among others.
And so the Yeltsin Center is today denounced as the ‘Yeltsin Sedition
Center’ by right-thinking political commentators on state television. Most of
its directors are now abroad in self-imposed exile.
The Higher
School is being cleansed of its worst elements from the standpoint of Russia’s
new patriotic leadership. And so it goes up and down the country. I will not
attempt to judge here the legality or effectiveness of the processes at work.
But that they are at work is undisputable. That the cleansing is popular with
the broad Russian population is also undisputable.
However,
the consolidation of Russian society is noteworthy not so much for the dross
that it has expelled as it is for the closer bonds that it is forging in the
population at large based on new self-confidence and support for the war effort
in Ukraine.
In past
essays, I mentioned the phenomenon of volunteer work across the Russian
Federation to solicit and collect contributions in money and kind to support
the Russian soldiers in the field. I spoke about the letters to the soldiers
from school children, about the food and clothing sent to the front by newly
formed local NGOs. I add to this the phenomenon
of volunteering to fight that is remarkable in scope and in who is coming
forward. These include Duma members, administrators and legislators from
oblasts reaching across European Russia, across Siberia to Kamchatka and the
Far East. These volunteers receive military training in specialized units,
among them one named “Akhmat” in honor of the father the Chechen leader Ramzan
Kadyrov and under his direct supervision.
Time spent
in the Donbas by Russian volunteers, even those not directly engaged in battle,
is not risk free. We all learned a week
ago of the nearly fatal injuries sustained by Dmitry Rogozin, one-time RF
Ambassador to NATO here in Brussels and for a number of years the head of
Roskosmos. We do not know what tasks he
was performing in Donbas as a volunteer, but we do know that he was caught in
an artillery barrage and that he had to undergo an operation to remove metal
fragments from the vertebrae of his neck.
Meanwhile,
Russian cities, led by Moscow and St Petersburg, have made collective
contributions of manpower to assist the war effort, something you will not read
about in The Financial Times. In the
time since the September mobilization, while the proper conditions for a major
offensive against the Ukrainian army are not yet met, the Russians have been
busy doing groundwork to ensure that there will be no further Ukrainian breakthroughs
along the 1,000 km front such as happened in Kharkov oblast in the late spring.
They have dug in and created second and third lines of defense consisting of
well executed trenches and pillboxes. And who did much of this? It was done by the 20,000 municipal workers
sent down to the Donbas by Mayor Sobyanin of Moscow and an additional 10,000
civilian workers sent by Petersburg.
News of
these volunteer works has spurred feelings of pride across Russia. At the same
time, the country’s resilience in the face of economic warfare by the
Collective West has been evident to everyone. The policy of import substitution
has turned into a broad program of reindustrialization. Success stories are
featured daily on the news.
The
government is giving cheap credits to manufacturing start-ups to provide
encouragement. With new, high paying positions being created, it is no wonder
that the Russian unemployment rate has moved down close to 3%. That all by
itself favors confidence and pride in society.
The other
side of the same coin is growing contempt for Europe and the Collective West. Russian news is providing accurate, not
propagandistic coverage of the energy crisis, rampant inflation and anxiety of
European populations. This, in combination with the acts of vandalism and
destruction perpetrated against Russian war monuments in the Eastern states of
the EU, in combination with other manifestations of Russophobia in Europe in
the cultural and tourism domains, has turned even the hitherto Western leaning
Russian intelligentsia into patriots by necessity.
In my most
recent comments on the New Year’s celebration on Russian state television, I
remarked on how recruitment to Russia’s leadership cadres in the future is
likely to come from among the heroes on the battlefield today.
For
guidance in this matter, I look back to what happened in the several decades
following the launch of Yuri Gagarin into orbit. Those who followed Gagarin
also set down new records and feats in space that other countries, including
the United States, only duplicated years later. These included the first woman
in space, the first space walk or the longest time in orbit. These heroic men
and women were not given just ticker tape parades in the capital. They were
given seats in the (largely ceremonial) legislative organs of the USSR.
We may well
expect today’s decorated soldiers similarly to be offered preferment and find
places in the Russian Federation legislative and administrative bodies. But
there is a lot more to expect in terms of advancement today. Given that field
officers have very practical and useful experience for running commercial
enterprises, whereas astronauts generally did not and do not, we may expect to
see the decorated officers take an honored place among the top managerial caste
in Russia as it retools and industrializes. There is nothing extraordinary in
that. After WWII, after the Korean War,
most top executive positions in American corporations went to veterans.
I have
spoken about re-industrialization. But there are also other changes in Russia
coming out of this war that are driven by the US-led sanctions. The forced
abandonment of Europe as its largest economic partner has compelled Russia to
expand ties with China, with India, with the Global South. This is grudgingly
getting some attention in The Financial
Times and other Western media, which have reported on the new
infrastructure being built and being planned to increase energy exports to
China and India, for example. A week ago, a gas field in Eastern Siberia using
a newly completed 800 km long pipeline is now feeding directly into the Power
of Siberia main pipeline to China.
There is
even mention in our media of the astonishing cooperation developing between
Russia and Iran to realize a North-South logistics project that was first
planned in the year 2000 but never found practical application. Today this
multi-modal rail, river and sea corridor stretching from St Petersburg in the
north to Mumbai in the south and traversing Iran is showing impressive first deliveries of
grain cargos and holds the promise of changing supply chains in Eurasia in a
cardinal manner, sharply reducing transit times and costs.
Of course,
the most important changes within Russia forced by the war in Ukraine concern
foreign relations. Our media have already speculated extensively about the
Russian-Chinese relationship which is self-described as closer than an
alliance. But there are new commercial, political and military relationships
between Russia and Iran, between Russia and North Korea. And there is the
Russian outreach to Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, i.e. to the Global
South for the sake of de-dollarization of trade and promotion of a multipolar
world order.
These
last-named changes in global commerce and furtherance of a multipolar world
have, as I say, gotten some expert attention in the West. What remains to be done
is to link them to the changes within Russian society in connection with the
new Russian self-awareness and confidence that I spoke about at the start of
this essay. There will be a lot of
catch-up work for the Western expert community once its infatuation with
Zelensky’s newly forged Ukraine passes into the dustbin of history.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023