PUTIN’S DESTINY
In the Ukraine crisis the world yearns for stability but stability is what Russia never delivers. Russia doesn’t know about stability. It’s always changing or planning a change or regretting the last change. Vladimir Putin is an old-fashioned imperialist in the land-grabbing tradition that stretches from Catherine the Great to Josef Stalin to Leonid Brezhnev. Putin wants to expand the empire, making it grander than he found it. Ukrainians who dream of joining the European Union stand in his way and he’ll do anything to brush them aside.
Catherine the Great would understand. She dragged her country into the 18th century and brought Russian culture to life through education. But what obsessed her was the growth of the empire. She expanded into Poland, installing a former lover on the throne, giving parts of Poland to Prussia and Austria, confiscating the rest. She warred successfully against Turkey, steadily acquiring new territory. Defeating the Ottoman Empire allowed her to take over the Crimean peninsula in 1783 and establish Sevastopol, Russia’s crucial southern port ever since — and now once again a source of conflict.
Ukraine has often suffered from the lust for conquest, above all in the 20th century. For many years, the Russian communist government devastated Ukraine and used starvation as a way to force peasants into line. Stalin collectivized its rich farmlands and forced Ukrainians to hand over their crops and their animals to bureaucrats. Farmers had to meet unrealistic quotas before taking any of their produce for themselves. Hundreds of farm communities starved in the Great Famine of 1932–33, which the Ukrainian parliament has condemned as genocide. Perhaps 10 million people died while the secret police took their food, to be eaten by in-
He’s building a Eurasian Union, a 21st-century version of empire, a relatively (but only relatively) gentle form of tyranny
dustrial workers in the Russian cities or sold abroad to raise hard currency.
It was the worst state-created famine in history. At the same time, toleration of Ukrainian national identity ended. The Ukrainian language was denigrated and state terror wiped out artists and intellectuals, classed by the communists as “nationalist deviationists.”
Putin is a post-communist leader with what looks like a Stalinist sense of destiny. He’s been planning a Eurasian Union that would evolve into a 21st-century version of empire, a relatively (but only relatively) gentle form of tyranny.
With the ruble as union currency, Moscow would orches- trate the economies of member states and Russia’s military forces would maintain order. It’s not impossible that in this form Russia could expand as impressively as the old Soviet Union, in which Putin learned about government as a career KGB officer.
Ukraine’s plan to join the EU threatened his grand scheme before it got properly under way. The pro-EU riots in Kyiv and elsewhere, and the forcible turfing out of Putin’s ally, President Viktor Yanukovych, were an affront to everyone hoping for a revival of Russian greatness, above all Putin.
He presents himself as a world-historical leader. But no matter how much he brags about the Olympics, he knows that his status shrinks when he allows lesser mortals, like Ukrainians, to defy him. And Russia’s weak economy increasingly looks like a reflection of his incompetence. In these circumstances, the European Union is a grave threat.
Anti-corruption regulations administered by Brussels wouldn’t allow Putin-style government. If they were successfully adopted by Ukraine, they could convert both Ukrainians and Russians to the West’s way of life. It was natural that the current trouble started in Crimea, where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet occupies Sevastopol on a long-term lease. Crimea is the only region where a majority of the population, about six in 10, are ethnic Russians. According to one recent poll, about four in 10 Crimean residents favour uniting with Russia.
Putin justified intervention in Crimea by claiming that the Russians who live there needed protection. That was also his explanation for sending troops to Georgia in 2008, troops that are still there. This is what Thomas de Waal, a British expert on the region, calls “soft annexation,” and may well turn out to be the immediate fate of Crimea.
In a referendum scheduled for May 16 (but declared illegitimate by the West), Crimean residents will be asked whether they want to join Russia or remain in Ukraine. Possibly the 16,000 troops Putin has deployed in Crimea will intimidate voters. On the other hand, he did it in a furtive way: Troops left their uniforms behind, claiming to be purely independent. That doesn’t sound much like the action of a confident imperial leader. Catherine the Great would have managed it better.