It is extremely difficult for any child of the
nationalist brew to ever give it up.
Actually most have to die and a new generation has to come on stage
without the basic indoctrination. After
all it is only now that most of the Hitler Youth have died out. Thus
all the leaders of Russia today and that is men and women in their
fifties and sixties are all classmates in the world of an imperial Russia. Before they had their turn at the wheel it
was all gone. For them nostalgia equates with their own youth.
It is very tempting to grab a little back. They do not understand that only Russians
were willing partners in that empire. At
least so far they have only taken clear Russian majority areas. They still need to be told to stop as this
can easily get out of hand.
The hard lesson of history is that the USSR won the Second
World War but failed miserably to win the peace because of horrible economic
ideas. Western economic ideas won that
peace.
I am looking for the next generation of Russian
leaders who are no longer adherents of the ideology of Greater Russia. A few obvious and simple fixes and Russia
will be a leader in NATO and a welcome participant in the European Union.
Behind the Russian Rage
s the old saying goes,
you cannot truly understand a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.
Perhaps Americans, a
fortunate tribe, should try to see the world from the vantage point of the
Russian people and Vladimir Putin, and, as the poet Robert Burns said, “see
ourselves as others see us.”
At 35, Putin was a rising
star in the elite secret police, the KGB, of a superpower with a worldwide
empire.
The USSR was almost three
times as large as the United States. Its European quadrant was half of the Old
Continent. The Soviet Empire extended from the Elbe River in Central Germany to
the Bering Strait across from Alaska. It encompassed thirteen time zones.
North to south, the USSR
reached from above the Arctic Circle down to the Middle East. Beyond the
contiguous empire were Soviet bases from Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam to Tartus in
Syria to Cienfuegos in Cuba.
Consider, then, what the
last dozen years of the 20th century must have been like for proud Russian
patriots and nationalists.
First, the European
empire suddenly and wholly collapsed. East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria all broke away to join the West. The Red Army came
home, undefeated, but also unwanted and even detested.
The Warsaw Pact, the
rival to NATO, dissolved.
Eastern Europe, which
Russians believe they had liberated from the Nazis at a monumental cost in
blood, turned its back on Russia, hailed the Americans as liberators, and
queued up to join a U.S.-led alliance created to contain Russia.
Then, as Germany was
reuniting, the Soviet Union began to break apart – what Putin calls the great
tragedy of the 20th century.
One-fourth of the nation
he grew up in and half its people vanished. Tens of millions of Russians were
left stranded in foreign lands.
Lithuania, Latvia and
Estonia departed first, leaving Russia with a tiny enclave on the Baltic Sea,
Kaliningrad, the old Prussian city of Konigsberg, isolated and wedged between
Poland and Lithuania.
Russia has no other
outlet to the Baltic except St. Petersburg at the top of the tiny narrow Gulf
of Finland. Russian warships must now pass between Helsinki and Tallinn even to
get out into the Baltic.
The great Russian navy of
Adm. Sergei Gorshkov is history.
This was but the
beginning. With the disintegration of the USSR, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova
were soon gone. Russia had now not only lost its Balkan allies Rumania and
Bulgaria, but all its Balkan borders. Only tiny Transnistria, which broke from
Moldova, remained loyal to Russia. But no one recognized it.
In the Caucasus, Georgia,
Armenia and Azerbaijan were gone. Russia had lost its border with Iran, Turkey
and the Middle East.
As Kazakhstan,
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan departed, Russia lost half
its border with China. Rather than dominating the Caspian Sea, Russia is now
confined to its far northern shore. Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan all
now have claims on Caspian Sea oil.
Came then the eastward
march of NATO to Moscow’s front door.
As NATO allies Lithuania,
Latvia and Estonia occupy the east coast of the Baltic Sea, NATO allies Rumania
and Bulgaria occupy the west coast of the Black Sea. Turkey sits on the south
coast of the Black Sea, aspiring NATO ally Georgia the east coast. Should
Ukraine join NATO, as John McCain seeks, the Black Sea becomes a NATO lake.
When Putin defended the
seizure of Crimea by saying he did not want to visit Russia’s two-century-old
naval base at Sevastopol, and be greeted by NATO sailors, did he not have a
point?
The vast territorial
losses suffered by the Soviet Union would be like the amputations America would
have endured had the secession of the 11 states of the Confederacy succeeded in
1865.
Our situation would be
comparable to Russia’s if we had lost all our states on the South Atlantic,
Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, and our ports of Norfolk, Charleston and New
Orleans all flew foreign flags.
And how would we have
reacted if a Soviet Union, victorious in the Cold War, effected the expulsion
of all U.S. troops and bases from Europe and brought Cuba, Venezuela and
Nicaragua into the Warsaw Pact?
State’s Victoria Nuland
says we invested $5 billion in re-orienting Ukraine away from Russia. How would
we respond if we awoke – as Putin did in February – to learn a pro-American
government in Mexico City had been overthrown by street mobs financed by
Beijing, a pro-China regime installed, and this unelected Mexican regime wanted
out of NAFTA in favor of joining an economic union and military alliance with
China?
A U.S. president who
landed Marines in Veracruz, as Wilson did in 1914, and sent a 21st-century
General “Black Jack” Pershing with an army across the border, would be over 70
percent in the polls, as Putin is today.
And if he seized Baja, as
Putin seized Crimea, it would be a cakewalk to a second term.
Patrick J. Buchanan is
the author of Churchill, Hitler, and
“The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. To find out more about
Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists,
visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.
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