OPINION: THE BLACK MADONNA AND THE RUSSIAN PROBLEM
Asharq Al-Awsat English (The Middle East), UK
March 7 2014
by Amir Taheri
Last month, when Vladimir Putin ordered that the Black Madonna of
Kazan, the holiest icon of the Russian Orthodox Church, be flown over
the Black Sea, many believed he wished to secure blessings for the
Winter Olympics in Sochi.
It was the first time the icon, or rather a copy of it, since the
original was stolen and possibly destroyed in 1904, was deployed to
bless a peaceful enterprise. Over the centuries, the “Black Virgin” has
been taken to battlefields to bless Russian armies fighting Swedish,
Polish, Turkish, Persian, French and German invaders. Stalin sent
it to Stalingrad in 1943 to ensure victory over the German invaders
under Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus.
With Putin’s troops in control of Crimea and threatening to move
further into Ukraine, we now know that the icon was brought in to
bless a military operation this time as well.
Putin appears strong because US President Barack Obama, accidentally
cast as the leader of Western democracies, is weak. Putin is over-using
the power Russia really doesn’t have because Obama under-uses the
power the US does have. As long as Obama prevents the US from playing
the leadership role it has had since the end of World War II, Putin
will see no reason why he should not pursue his dream of reviving
the Soviet Empire wherever possible. In doing so he is acting within
a tradition established since the 18th century, when Russia emerged
as a power with a pathological fear of encirclement. That fear has
always made Russia aggressive.
Throughout the 19th century, Russia used “the protection of Christian
minorities” as an excuse for invading its Muslim neighbors, especially
the Ottoman Empire and Iran, annexing vast chunks of territory. The
whole of Northern Caucasus, plus Georgia and Armenia, were annexed with
that excuse, as was Crimea. In the 18th century, Empress Catherine
II used the pretext of protecting Christians to wrest away Dagestan
and Georgia from Iran.
Russia also used the excuse to seize territories that belonged to
European neighbors, including Germany, Poland and Finland. For almost
100 years, Russia expanded at the average rate of 62 square miles
(100 square kilometers) a day, creating history’s largest empire in
terms of territory.
Casting itself as the “Third Rome” and the final defender of
Christianity, Russian empire-builders claimed that their enterprise
enjoyed divine blessing.
Russia has used the trick of granting Russian nationality to people
in neighboring countries as a pretext for invasion since the 18th
century. In 1829, Russia used the excuse of freeing Georgian women,
supposedly granted Russian citizenship, from the harem of the Qajar
Shah of Persia as a pretext for an invasion of Iran. A Tehran mob
retaliated by murdering the Russian charge d’affaires, Alexander
Griboyedov.
In 1911, a number of Qajar princes led by Shu’a Al-Saltaneh (The Light
Beam of Monarchy) and opposed to Iran’s Constitutional Revolution
declared themselves subjects of the Tsar and raised Russian flags
on top of their palaces. The Tsar used the pretext of “protecting”
his subjects for invading Iran, occupying five Iranian provinces and
sending an army to destroy the newly created Iranian parliament.
In 1912, Russia used the excuse of protecting its citizens for
invading parts of China and annexing large chunks of land, especially
in what is now Mongolia. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the
empire, re-named the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, replaced
Christianity with Communism as its ideological matrix. It was in the
name of defending “Socialism” that, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet
Union sent is tanks to Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The invasion
of Afghanistan in 1979, too, was sold as a bid to “defend Socialism.”
After the disintegration of the Soviet Empire in 1991, Russia
revived the old excuse of protecting its “kith and kin” in neighboring
countries. In some instances, those minorities are genuine communities
shaped over a century or so. In others, however, “kith-and-kin”
communities are artificial creations to be used as a means of pressure
on weaker neighbors.
Under Putin, Moscow has been distributing large numbers of Russian
passports, some suggest millions, in neighboring countries,
notably Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia
and Kazakhstan. There are also significant numbers of Russian
passport-holders in Transnistria, part of Moldova, which does not
have a border with Russia.
The first test of the “kith-and-kin” excuse came in 2000 when, as
prime minister, Putin forced Tajikistan to host 15,000 Russian troops
stationed at six bases. The next time “kith-and-kin” was cited was
in August 2008, coinciding with the Beijing Olympics, when Putin,
this time as president, ordered an invasion of Georgia and annexed
the autonomous republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Today, Russia
has some 40,000 troops stationed in the two enclaves.
Ukraine is the third nation to experience Putin’s “kith-and-kin” game,
and if Putin manages to pull this one off, it will not be the last.
Putin’s shenanigans in Crimea are symptoms of a deeper malaise
caused by Russia’s inability to gauge its place in the post-Cold War
international order and the inability of European powers and the United
States to accommodate Russia in a way commensurate with its weight,
if not its ambitions.
In the past quarter of a century, with the loss of its glacis in
eastern and central Europe, Russia has seen NATO arrive right at its
borders. The entire European continent has been reorganized within the
framework fixed by NATO and the European Union. Today, Russia is just
one of four European powers still shut out of both NATO and the EU. It
took Russia almost two decades to gain admission into the World Trade
Organization (WTO) and, more tentatively, be offered a side chair at
the G8. The only leadership slot Russia has had is its veto-holding
seat in the UN’s Security Council, a relic of the Cold War. But even
then, until Obama paralyzed US foreign policy the Western powers,
led by Washington, simply ignored Russia whenever it suited them,
as was the case in the 2003 military intervention in Iraq.
Putin has built his narrative on the theme of encirclement by
hostile powers and their “agents” inside Russia. To the West, Russia
is shut out of Europe, which paradoxically remains its principal
trading partner. To the south, Russia is hemmed in by a string of
Muslim-majority nations with deep-rooted resentment of Tsarist
and Communist oppression. To the east, Russia faces two hostile
powers–China and Japan, part of whose territories remain under
Russian occupation.
At home, Russia faces a seemingly endless war against jihadist
forces in five Caucasian republics, while relations with Georgia
and Armenia remain strained. Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev claims
that Russia today is in the vanguard of fighting “Islamic terror”
and its aim of world conquest. However, jihadists are not alone
in posing a threat to Putin’s idealized vision of a greater Russia
seeking global leadership. Well-financed Christian missionary groups,
mostly from the US, are expanding their networks throughout Russia at
the expense of the Orthodox Church, which has become Putin’s principal
ideological ally.
To make matters worse for Putin, his autocratic style of rule is also
challenged by a growing number of Russians seduced by the Western
ideas of multi-party democracy, pluralism and desacralization of
political power.
Meanwhile, the domination of the Russian economy by the oligarchs,
whose support Putin needs, has slowed down, and in some cases even
prevented, genuine development. Russia has become an exporter of raw
materials, especially oil and gas, dependent on European markets.
Worse still, a good part of the capital formed in Russia finds its
way into European banks, especially in Britain and Switzerland.
Today, the real issue is not whether Russian troops remain inside their
bases in Crimea or show their teeth in the streets of Sebastopol. The
real issue is how to find Russia a place in a world order in the
creation of which it played no part. Putin’s current policy could
transform Russia into a fully fledged rogue state. And that would be
dangerous both for Russia and the world, even if the Black Madonna
of Kazan were brought in to perform a miracle.
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in
Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable
publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for
Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987. Mr. Taheri has won several prizes for
his journalism, and in 2012 was named International Journalist of
the Year by the British Society of Editors and the Foreign Press
Association in the annual British Media Awards.
http://www.aawsat.net/2014/03/article55329733