Genri Reznik, the veteran Russian lawyer, has an interesting comment to make on Ekho Moskvy:
He notes that in discussing the issue of the Crimea and the forthcoming "referendum" (which I personally would rather call a mass "active measure"), people have invoked Scotland and Quebec
I could add that they are not really a parallel at all, because neither British nor Canadian rulers historically first deported more than a quarter of a million people from the given breakaway region, killing half their population, then gave away the region to an only nominally separate state which was really under their control, then conceding that former constituent territory its independence while situating their large naval fleet there, then grabbing it back with armed force. So no, not a parallel.
Even so, Reznik wryly says the following
Some alarmed voices have sounded: will the self-determination of the Crimea push separate parts of our country to leaving the Russian Federation, above all, of course, the Caucasian Republics?
I hasten to reassure everyone -- to gladden or infuriate. The new Art. 280-1 introduced into the Russian Federation Criminal Code is: "Public calls for the implementation of actions aimed at violation of the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation." So if the local parliament of any region passes a decision to leave Russian statehood, and calls for a referendum, the people's chosen ones are looking at up to five years of prison.
Reznik notes that this law was passed December 28, 2013, at the heighth of the EuroMaidan protests.
"Does this lead you to any thoughts?" asks Reznik rhetorically.
"Yes, no accident, comrades," say I.
Reznik notes that he is "against separatism and for the inviolability of the state borders established by the Helsinki accords."
Indeed, Reznik is a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group and that was always their position, and indeed, most of the Soviet-era dissidents as well as decent intelligentsia have this position. That's why, when Khodorkovsky made what many found to be an ill-conceived remark about Chechnya soon after his release from prison (his remark about Chechnya being "ours" and "we fought for it" and "we won't face bloodshed over losing it" etc) -- and a number of people were having cows, I had to point out that they never had such cows over Sergei Kovalev or Svetlana Gannushkina having essentially the same federalist position, if more tuanced or tacit, and more inclined to emphasize the human rights problems that engender the desire for separatism in the first place.
That is, there are few Russian dissident intellectuals of any kind that endorse separatism. They especially don't endorse fighting a war in which many lives would be lost -- which was already the case with two Chechen wars -- that would end in independence. They imagine that if such a separatist force *won* -- it would do so only by massive loss of life. Judging from how they *lost* with massive loss of life, this is strange reasoning, but whatever.
These Moscow intellectuals might nobly invoke the Helsinki Accords, which were to set the post-World War II borders in stone, or they might merely let us see their Eurasianist slip showing, but there it is.
BTW, despite those inviolable borders that the Soviets were willing to trade for what they viewed as empty language on human rights, they weren't so inviolable in the end. That is, nobody complained about violations of the Helsinki Accords when all the republics of the USSR got their independentce after 1991. Nobody complained when the border between East Germany and West Germany disappeared. They complained when Russia snapped off Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia, however, because it meant less freedom for those territories and more risk for Georgia's democacy.
That's because it's really about social systems -- or to be even more blunt, about authoritarian governments that defy the rule of law -- or not.
Many people like to point out the US invasion of Iraq as a counter-narrative.Like the propose the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the counter-narrative of how the US "helped" bin Ladn (false) and then invaded Afghanistan. These are false moral equivalencies all around, because they overlook the overwhelming Soviet malevolence and mass murder -- a million Afghan civilians lost their lives in the Soviet occupation, nothing near the losses during the US war -- where the lion's share of killings were done by the Taliban and its allies, hardly the US, or its ally, Karzai.
And don't forget the Soviet allies for years were both Iran and Iraq, not to mention Syria, and the Soviets sponsored the PLA and other terror in the Middle East for years. That's why, when the Russians open their mouths to sputter about the US invasion of Iraq, I cry foul. They helped pave the way for the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq by propping up Saddam and thwarting inspections and themselves being up to their necks in the corrupt "oil-for-food" scandals. They supported Iran and Syria that then -- as now! -- are the main purveyors of havoc in the region. You can complain all you like about the US getting involved in regime change when it didn't really have the ability or the follow through and should have stayed home. But have the intellectual honesty to explain the context for this: Soviet, then Russian malevolence and duplicity and distraction. (And I've always wondered whether the Russians moved those WMDs to Syria, and whether some day, we'll hear that story, years from now.)
However you want to condemn the Iraq invasion -- I took part in a peace march against it with my daughter at the time -- there's this:
It's important to remember that in fact, what happened then is not only that the US didn't get any approval from the UN Security Council -- that approval that Russians feel is so vital for military action anywhere in the world, but which they don't feel applies to their forces in Ukraine (and the Soviets didn't feel applied to their forces in Afghanistan, which went there after the signing of the Helsinki Accords, of which Afghanistan wasn't a member anyway.)
There's an important political component to all this everyone always forgets, however: Sergei Lavrov, who was the Russian ambassador to the UN at the time, didn't get what he wanted on Iraq -- a condemnation of the US invasion by the UN Security Council. He tried to run a resolution of condemnation -- and it failed. Failed resolutions don't have a history embedded on un.org pages but I remember it and surely somebody has written about this somewhere.
That means that while there wasn't an approval, there wasn't a condemnation either -- and frankly, in UN terms, that nearly counted as a tactit consent.
In 2002, aside from the permanent five (US, UK, France, Russia, China), there were these 10 elected members: Bulgaria, Cameroon, Columbia, Guinea, Ireland, Mauritius, Mexico, Norway, Singapore, Syrian Arab Republic. The votes weren't sufficient to get the Russians' way to condemn the US (at lesat 6 out of the elected 10 would vote with the US and UK, maybe more).
BTW, for real nerds, study Resolution 1441, and also Resolution 668 which were Sadam's Hussein's "last chance" resolutions to comply with inspectors. That resolution had language about the Sadam's support of terrorists in the region that were a threat to Israel and the West which all the antiwar lefties conveniently forget now when they rage and beat their chests about "missing WMDs." There was also the "oil-for-food" scandals and "grave" human rights violations -- other UN findings put in that resolution that few remember now.
To be sure, as you can read on Wikipedia (or just read the resolution in full itself at un.org under "Security Council"), there were no "hidden triggers" for the use of force for non-compliance. You know, like the Syrian resolution.
There's yet another side to all this -- the utter phoniness of Moscow's claim that it will take care of Russians in the near abroad by bringing them back to the Motherland. While technically there is such a policy, and Russian citizenship all over the world gets recognized for the In-Gathering of the Tribe, in reality, Russia doesn't have the budget for adding lots of people to its social security rolls, which is what it would have to do with a lot of middle-aged and elderly former Soviet-era employees. So it doesn't.
Example: You don't notice any huge caravan of concern for the 30,000 or so Russians in Turkmenistan left without any choice but to accept Turkmen citizenship forced upon them because dual citizenship is no longer recognized and Russia refuses to go to bat for its citizens languishing there, unable even to travel unless they decide one way or another.
Younger ethnic Russian or Russian-speaking people and those with transplantable specialities or relatives to support them have gotten out of Turkmenistan, but many remain behind (those numbers aren't scientific because it's really hard to get independent research done in Turkmenistan).
I don't have the figures for all the other republics but perhaps some migration specialists have worked on this and it could be assembled. Let's call it a half a million people or who knows, maybe many millions more. Russia is not interested in having these people to take care of. Not at all. When some of their rabid nationalists in the parliament say they advocate this return migration to "balance" the influx of Caucasians and Central Asians who have come to Russia as migrant labour, they are talking through their hats. Labour migrants work. Returning Soviets don't work. Especially outside of Moscow in poorer districts, pragmatic city and region managers don't especially welcome the expansion of their welfare rolls.
The Crimean leaflets in support of the referendum might claim that people will be able to triple their salaries -- but I'll be surprised to see if Russia actually does anything remotely like give everyone in the Crimea a triple raise.
Let's face it, one of the ways that Georgia got set up for Russian intriguing was by not issuing citizenship to tens of thousands of people displaced in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period. That enabled the Russians to rush in with Russian passports and make trouble.
But for the Georgians, this isn't merely out of some ethnic issue, as Georgia itself is made up of lots of ethnicities. It's about who pays for people. Citizenship is really just a stand-in for "social services". In these countries that still remain heavily socialist in expectation if not in delivery, it means "budget workers," or people who work state jobs, as teachers or medical personnel or other state institutions who have jobs that way. It means pensions and subsidies of all kinds that many people still draw on in the post-Soviet space, despite all the yammering you always read about how Jeffrey Sachs colluded with Yeltsin and Larry Summers of Harvard to ruin the economy blah blah. It was never as ruined as much as they said as these post-Soviet leaders really were under the gun to keep subsidizing large parts of the population if not for humanitarian reasons, pragmatic reasons to prevent communist or neo-bolshevik revanchism. (And in my view, the 1990s represent the collapse of communism, not the failure of capitalism.)
Maybe Putin was willing to spend $50 billion on Sochi because as a mid-level KGB agent, he was jealous that he never got a vacation there under the old Soviet system. Crimea is a rank below in resort ratings, surely, and I doubt he'll have $50 billion to turn Crimea into the resort destination of the region; indeed, the investment in Sochi was predicated on the idea that after the Olympics, the oligarchs could keep selling condos and vacation packages with all the new infrastructure built. They are hardly going to now switch out to the Crimea.
When Sean Guillory talks about the costs of Crimea, he acts as if Putin would actually spend what is needed to keep it. He won't have to. People can be bought on the strength of leaflets and Soviet aspirations that never died.
It's interesting that neighboring Belarus now appears to be changing its stance on Ukraine, with a decidedly wary note creeping into officially approved statements on the situation. The restoration of the Soviet Union may not prove to be the walk in the park that the Russian leadership apparently thinks it will.
What happens on or after March 16 will be crucial not only for Ukraine but also for Europe as a whole. The massive buildup of Russian military forces on Ukraine's eastern border indicates that Russia plans an invasion of the Ukrainian mainland - but it's an operation that may have unintended consequences that will lead to the collapse and breakup of Russia itself.
Posted by: David McDuff | March 12, 2014 at 04:57 AM