COLUMN: PUTIN SEEKS TO RECLAIM RUSSIA’S LOST TRIBES
Valley News, NH
March 10 2014
Michael Moran
At 4:45 a.m. on Sept. 1, 1939, a German warship opened fire on the city
of Danzig, a Polish-administered enclave — overwhelmingly populated
by ethnic Germans — that had been separated from Germany since World
War I.
Throughout the previous decade, Adolf Hitler had intimidated
neighboring states into relinquishing regions where German speakers
made their homes: France in the Rhineland in 1936, the Anschluss
absorption of Austria in 1938, followed by the most famous such
capitulation, the Franco-British appeasement that forced Czechoslovakia
to hand Germany the Sudetenland region — again, largely populated
by ethnic Germans.
But it was in Danzig where bullying failed and true violence began.
Among the city’s residents was Gunter Grass, a German boy whose
description of the opening salvos of World War II would later win
him a Nobel Prize for his novel The Tin Drum.
It’s so easily written: machine guns, twin turrets. Might it not
have been a cloudburst, a hailstorm, the deployment of a late-summer
thunderstorm like the one that accompanied my birth? I was too sleepy,
such speculations were beyond me, and so, the sounds still fresh in my
ear, like all sleepyheads I simply and aptly called a spade a spade:
Now they are shooting!
As I write, they are not yet shootting in Crimea and in Donetsk. But
efforts to enforce the rights of ethnic groups across international
borders often lead to war, especially when those groups are the
remnants of a collapsed empire.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s stridently nationalistic president, should
consider the parallels as he plots his next move. Putin talks a lot
about precedent these days as he seeks to justify his infiltration
of Russian special forces and intelligence agents to seize government
centers in the Ukrainian region of Crimea.
“I believe that only residents of a given country who have freedom of
will and are in complete safety can and should determine their future,”
Putin said last week. “If this right was granted to the Albanians in
Kosovo, if this was made possible in many different parts of the world,
then nobody has ruled out the right of nations to self-determination.”
No one, of course, is fooled by this. Indeed, when compared with the
1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, the Russians today are playing
the Serbian card. At issue in Kosovo, then an autonomous province
of Serbia, was the protection of an ethnic Albanian majority from a
larger power using violence. That is, a larger power using a “lost
tribe” — in that case, ethnic Serbs — as an excuse to occupy and
repress another ethnic group. And this is precisely what Russia has
in mind in Ukraine.
If Putin wants to consider the potential consequences of his current
actions, he should first remember his stint as a KGB agent — in
Dresden — a city obliterated by firebombing at the end of a world
war started in the name of reuniting the lost tribes of Germany.
Putin is no Hitler. This goes without saying, but must be said
nonetheless. But Putin’s own frequent evocations of Nazis and fascists
in his descriptions of the Ukrainians who overthrew and impeached
pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych has invited Hitler into the
conversation.
So — when considering ethnic ties as a pretext for bold diplomatic
bullying and outright military adventures — are there actual
similarities between Hitler and Putin?
The dispersion of ethnic groups across multiple states in diasporas
is not new or confined to Germany and Russia. Nor, of course, is it
peculiar to Europe. Often, the lost-tribe argument proves a useful
pretext for diplomatic snubs, and sometimes war.
For example, Thailand and Malaysia dispute ownership of southern
Thailand, where Muslim insurgents have been battling security forces
since the 1970s. India and Pakistan have gone to war repeatedly — in
1947, 1965 and 1999 — over their rival claims to rule the people of
Kashmir. Indonesia invaded the island of East Timor in 1976 allegedly
to free it from colonial Portuguese rule — but truly to prevent
Timorese independence (which it granted only reluctantly in 1999).
Non-Russian former Soviet states have also experienced this plight. In
the early 1990s, Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a bitter conflict over
the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, where ethnic Armenians were resisting
Azerbaijani rule. When Georgia’s ethnic Russians in South Ossetia
and Abkhazia declared separatist states in 1991, Georgia pushed back
and tried to squash these attempts. But Tbilisi was unsuccessful:
Russia rolled in with tanks and troops in 2008.
Even in the Americas, the ghosts of plantation policies and imperial
collapse are present. In 1836, the Republic of Texas cited protection
of the rights of ethnic Americans — Anglos — as part of its reason
for declaring independence from Mexico. More recently, British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher went to war in 1982 over the “ethnic
Britons” of the Falkland Islands.
The Soviet empire’s collapse is only the most recent example of
ancient ethnic diasporas — or colonial remnants — sparking modern
wars. Ever since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union (which we are
constantly reminded ranks as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe”
of the 20th century in Putin’s eyes), Russia has played this card,
arguing that when sizable Russian communities remain in former
Soviet states, there is justification for treating these countries
as less-than-sovereign entities.
This hardly began with Putin. In 1990, Boris Yeltsin, his predecessor,
ordered a Russian army led by Gen. Alexander Lebed to Moldova to
support a separatist bid by ethnic Russians in that newly independent
— and largely ethnic Romanian — country. This would become a
harbinger of things to come in Georgia in 2008 and possibly now in
Ukraine. At the time, the ethnic Russian (and some ethnic Ukrainian)
citizens of Moldova declared themselves the republic of Trans-Dniester
— named for the river that formed the border of a region called
Bessarabia, which, history buffs may recall, Joseph Stalin stole
from Romania in the 1939 deal that also split Poland between Stalin
and Hitler.
There he is again. Nary a bad word about Stalin from the current
Russian government, of course — a man who, some scholars argue,
killed even more people than the Austrian corporal, if not in such
a spectacularly racist, efficient and megalomaniacal way. But Hitler
stalks the current narrative in multiple ways. Here, European history
offers a template for reassembling an imploded empire, as well as
trade craft for stoking up public support in Russia for actions that
might otherwise be seen as reckless.
While Putin’s motives may only pay lip service to the alleged peril
ethnic Russians face outside the federation’s borders, he has rich
ground for sowing doubt about the motives of Ukrainian nationalists.
In the months before Hitler turned on his Soviet ally in 1940, German
agents expertly fomented anger and intrigue in many non-Russian
communities within the Soviet Union, from the Baltic lands to the
Tatars of Crimea to Ukraine.
Few remember now the many divisions of Hitler’s armies that were
drawn from ethnic groups in conquered territories and even neutral
states, including Ukraine. Indeed, Ukraine contributed some 80,000
troops in three divisions to the German Wehrmacht, including one
division of the Waffen SS. Ukrainians were hardly alone. Germany
fielded divisions manned by Georgians, Armenians, Finns, the Vichy
French and even the neutral Swedes during the war. And Russia itself
was not immune: Ten full divisions of anti-communist White Russian
emigres joined Hitler’s army — some 250,000 officers and Russian
elite styling themselves as the “Russian Liberation Army” under the
czarist general Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov.
Ukrainians and others also fought Russian partisans alongside German
units and served as guards in Hitler’s death camps — John Demjanjuk,
the former U.S. autoworker from Cleveland whose prosecution on
war crimes made headlines in 1993, was one of them. But Ukrainian
nationalists — and their cohorts in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia,
Georgia and countless other places duped by Hitler into siding with
the western “liberators” — had been murdered and starved to death in
the millions by Stalin’s communist tyranny in the 1930s. What might
have seemed as a lesser of two evils may, in retrospect, have been
a greater evil — or at least a commensurate one.
Nonetheless, for Russians, the word “fascist” has very real and
profoundly divisive emotional consequences. The shame of non-Russian
nationalists at the sins of their grandparents remains fertile today.
The sins of Stalin, however, have been downplayed repeatedly,
particularly since Yeltsin’s brand of romantic Slavic nationalism
gave way to Putin’s Soviet nostalgia and all its big-power trappings.
For all his citations of Western-led interventions in Libya and
Kosovo as precedents for Russia’s actions, Putin must understand
that he is stirring a very dangerous pot. Russia has land borders
with 14 countries — more states than any other nation on Earth
other than China (which also borders 14, including Russia). Many
of those neighboring states contain large populations of people who
self-identify as Russians. But Russia itself also contains millions
of ethnic Koreans, Mongols, Uighurs and others whose crowded,
resource-starved motherlands may someday have their own designs on
reincorporating their lost tribes.
In the Russian Far East, this dynamic is palpable, and it is common to
hear Russians in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk complain about the influx
of Korean and Chinese money, along with immigrant workers. Some 80
million Chinese and 45 million Koreans live in the provinces that
border Russia. The population of Russia’s own Far Eastern territory,
Primorsky Krai, is below 2 million.
All that land, all that oil — and lost tribes, to boot. Putin should
be worried less about the precedents he cites and more about those
he sets.
Michael Moran is author of The Reckoning: Debt, Democracy and the
Future of American Power. He was an editor at Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty in Munich from 1990 to 1993.
http://www.vnews.com/opinion/columns/11030792-95/column-putin-seeks-to-reclaim-russias-lost-tribes