Putin's Dearms of Empire; Russia Is Ousted From Group of 8

Some have said that I exaggerate Vladimir Putin's megalomania when I compare him to Adolph Hitler.  Yet, Putin's excuse for annexing Crimea relied on a concept of protecting ethnic Russians much as Hitler used the argument of protecting ethnic Germans as he annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia.  And let's not for get that Putin is also making claims of the uniqueness and special character of Russia and Russian civilization to play on the centuries old Russian inferiority complex relative to the west and western Europe in particular.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at Putin's delusions of grandeur that ought to be frightening to students of history.  Here are excerpts:

After the Russian anschluss in Crimea last week, people around the world are asking themselves uneasily: How far will Moscow go? What does Russian President Vladimir Putin really want? The answer can be found in the words of his supporters.

Consider this widely shared Facebook post by a Moscow yuppie named Artem Nekrasov: “If Putin manages to annex Crimea and the southeast of Ukraine peacefully I personally forgive him everything: wild corruption, the lawlessness of officials, lack of any prospects in the economy, disorder in education and journalism and even the common stupefaction of the people....” The post is popular because, as polls show, it reflects the common mood in Russia. Putin’s approval rating is 75 percent since he announced the annexation of Crimea.

A Moscow television channel interviewed old Soviet veterans at the Nahimov naval academy occupied by the Russian army in Sevastopol, Crimea. Like Putin, they longed for the old days. “Because of the disintegration of the USSR we lost Odessa [on the Black Sea] and a part of the Baltic,” one said. “But our current commander-in-chief [Putin, of course] is a gatherer of Soviet lands. We place our hopes in him!”

As journalist and political scientist Alexander Morozov writes in his widely-read essay “Conservative Revolution: Making Sense of Crimea,” Putin’s logic is no longer tied to those rational considerations of cooperation and economic interdependence on which the West puts so much faith. His is now a “revolutionary” mindset in which he and his followers are ready to sacrifice Western capital, risk having their assets frozen, and rely on “political myth”—a focus on heroism, sacrifice and martyrdom—to generate public support. There is no rational response to this. Those infected by the myth cannot imagine any other possibility for the future but success: “Crimea is ours!”

Russians appear to be possessed by their desire to pull together all the lands held by the Russian Empire a hundred years ago. Even to the most simple-minded of Putin’s supporters, this has come to seem a spiritual mission, though few could explain it convincingly before an audience. Popular Russian media suggest two ways to conceive of this cause, one based on “Spiritual Ties” among Russians, the other as resistance to the “Venal Perverted West.” Constant propaganda impresses on the minds of average Russians that they are exceptional because of where they were born and the language they speak, but apart from that does little to elucidate the riddle of this exceptionalism. Instead they fall back on the “Mysterious Russian Soul,” which means “something perfect that nobody can explain,” and those who would dare to try intepreting it are playing the game of the “Venal Perverted West.”

But such primitive and fanciful ideas are just the skin on top of hot milk. An ideologue named Sergey Kurginyan has tried to articulate a much more extensive and coherent vision of Russian superiority to justify what he calls “USSR 2.0.”

“The only possible form in which our country can exist is as an empire that is a union of equal peoples,” writes Kurginyan. The Russian people should form the state at the center, “a nucleus around which other peoples are gathered.” In his opinion Russia cannot be a part of  Europe, because Russia is Europe, too, but a different alternative Europe descended from the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium, while modern Western Europe comes from the Western Roman Empire.

If we ask ourselves at the end of the day, “What does Putin want?” the simplest answer would be “to keep 75 per cent of the Russian people behind him.” And the only way to do that is to foster and preserve the myth of the Russians’ innate superiority. Military adventures work. So do hypnotic diatribes on television. Put the two together and we are where we are today.

There is much more that to the article that should be read, but the bottom line is that Putin is playing on a Russian mindset that has persisted for over a thousand years - that Russia is special and that it has a holy mission.  In some ways, the myth is similar to the myth of American exceptionalism so popular with the far right in America.  Both are a dangerous and toxic form of chauvinism that can have disastrous consequences.

Meanwhile, as the New York Times reports, Russia has been ousted from the Group of 8:

The United States and its closest allies on Monday cast Russia out of the Group of 8 industrialized democracies, their most exclusive club, to punish President Vladimir V. Putin for his lightning annexation of Crimea, while threatening tougher sanctions if he escalates aggression against Ukraine.

President Obama and the leaders of Canada, Japan and Europe’s four strongest economies gathered for the first time since the Ukraine crisis erupted last month, using a closed two-hour meeting on the sidelines of a summit meeting about nuclear security to project a united front against Moscow.

But they stopped short, at least for now, of imposing sanctions against what a senior Obama administration official called vital sectors of the Russian economy: energy, banking and finance, engineering and the arms industry. Only further aggression by Mr. Putin — like rolling his forces into the Ukrainian mainland — would prompt that much-harsher punishment, the countries indicated in their joint statement, called the Hague Declaration.

 The take away from all of this?  With Putin, the West is not dealing with a rational individual under a western definition of the term.  The man is dangerous and will continue to use Hitler like demagoguery to play on long standing insecurities and mindset that predominate in Russia.