Indian journalist MJ Akbar has claimed that he he has changed his mind about supporting the fall of the Soviet Union in the light of the way it has given the USA a free hand to invade Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. In the Guardian he writes,In the first decade of this century, there is a vacuum where once lay the brooding, looming Soviet shadow, a force that kept its own citizens under a form of house arrest and yet inspired enough fear in Anglo-American hawks to restrain their imperial tendencies.The notion that the USSR was a force for peace and 'stability' is only a post ex-facto rationalisation given the subsequent rise of the neoconservatives into power by 2000 which was a result of US Imperial hubris after 'defeating' the USSR and 'winning' the Cold War.
Would the Bush-Blair partnership have invaded Iraq in 2003 with such brazen impunity if Uncle Stalin, or even Cousin Brezhnev, had been around?Akbar is not defending the USSR ideologically but from the perspective of Central Asian realpolitik. As such the condition of people within the Soviet Union or the misrule and repression of the one party states in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary et al does not interest him.
There have been power worshipping realists in the past such as EH Carr who supported the Soviet Union on that basis and on the notion that the alternative to the Imperium in the East was, as it subsequently has been, one of ethnic irredentism and conflicting religious enmities.
Yet these were already happening before the final demise of the USSR. Brezhnev was pushed into Afghanistan in 1979 not only because Brzezinski had already pushed to arm and fund the mujahadeen but because Islamist ideas were spreading in the Soviet Muslim Republics.
There were concerns, as Geoffrey Hosking points out in his History of the Soviet Union that the Slavic races were starting to be displaced and potentially outnumbered by the demographic increase in the number of Soviet Muslim citizens.
This makes it difficult to accept Akhbar's contention that,
In the best of all possible worlds, we would have had, in the first decade of the 21st century, a half-Brezhnev as head of the Union of Semi-Socialist Soviet Republics, a muscular superpower in which Pravda was as free as the Guardian and Izvestia as irreverent as the Sun.That ignores the centrifufal forces breaking up the USSR before 1991 and the continuities in US policy which served to accelerate that. In particular, the desire of the Soviet Islamic elites to control the oil and gas wealth and Brzezinski's policy of encouraging that from the 1970s.
That US policy was intiated by Brzezinski because he exploited Soviet weaknesses and not, as some claim, because was so clever as to destroy the promise of a secular democratic experiment of the PDPA in Afghanistan singlehandedly by supporting the mujahadeen.
Often the case for preserving the USSR depends on the belief that detente between Carter and Brezhnev could have worked and the USSR reformed into a more politically liberal empire without losing all the 'social acheivements'. It is tempting to believe so but unfortunately a myth.
Moreover, the Soviet Union certainly did not make for 'stability'. It did not deter the US invasion of Vietnam ( result two million dead ) Nor the proxy wars between the USA, China and the USSR in SE Asia. Nor did Cold War bipolarity prevent the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
The Cold War is a misnomer in many ways. As Niall Ferguson points out in The War of the World it was distinctly 'hot' in other parts of the globe beyond the developed world and the Communist bloc Warsaw Pact nations of what was then "Eastern Europe".
Certainly the end of the Soviet Union was a 'geopolitical catastrophe' but from its inevitable demise came good ( the liberation of Central Europe ) and bad ( the ethnic irredentist wars in the Caucasus and the competition for oil and gas in 'the stans'.
Yet this was a return to history and not the End of History espoused by Fukuyama. With the revival of classic geopolitics the Great Game of the nineteenth century for control of Eurasia has resumed as has the friction between the ethnic groups of the former imperium.
That has been shown dramatically by the War in Chechnya as well as the wars between the Georgians and the South Ossetians and Saakashvili's nationalist attack on Russian peacekeeping forces in the successionist territories in August 2008.
The article was mentioning about how the influence of the USSR would be on restraining global misadventures, but I would argue from a humanitarian perspective for all those inhabiting the region of the SU that it was worth preserving, or at least gone through transition more slowly.
ReplyDeleteI do not know what your deleted post was, but I was trying to argue that the collapse in provision of health, pensions etc since 1991 has been a disasster, as have been the ethnic conflicts, as has also been the tragedy of the diaspora in various countries treated as second class citizens. Not just the Russians, all those who enjoyed freedom of movement during the SU era and now need to go through a visa process to see their relatives or the town where they were born.
The amount of misery since 1991 is incalcuable. Someone said their were 60 million unessesary deaths, which might be a bit far fetched. However it is perfectly reasaonable to assume a minimum 20 million died needlessly, through alcoholism, despair,unemplyment, suicide, lack of health provision, lack of pension money to pay for food and heating.
Well, the statistics on the scale of the deaths are questionable but the demographic catastrophe was real for Russia as was the immiseration of so many citizens whose savings and pensions were wiped out by the botched 'shock therapy reforms' of Gadar and Chubais in the 1990s.
ReplyDeleteInstead of arguing the relative merits and demeits of the Soviet Union vs the successor republics and Russia it is best to stress the historical continuity between Soviet Socialism and IMF neoliberalism ( or Market Bolshevism ).
Both 1917 and 1991 saw two attempts to force Russia along the path of Westernisation and to accept that there would be a 'transition period' of privation followed by an economic and political resurgence. It nver worked that way.
The Soviet Union succeeded in following that path through a ruthless and democodal form of breakneck industrialisation that was not on offer to the 'Young Reformers' who were more interested in marketing Russia's industries to foreign capitalist interests.
When Russian power imploded under Yeltsyn the crash of 1998 finally had some effects in restructuring the Russian economy and was followed by Putin's new hybrid form of authoritarian state market capitalism and a revived nationalism.
That is not what the USA intended so it started funding NGOS staffed by exactly the same bunch who caused the misery in the first place which is why the Union of Righgtist Forces and Yabloko, supposed "liberals" perform so dismally in elections.
PS We can discuss things here, I'm now being, I think, pre-moderated by the "moderators" because of the Auschwitz posts and mybe one on that idiotic Minaret Installation a few days before.
ReplyDeleteI think the Auschwitz posts have sealed my status as a commentator of the Guardian though.
Babel states in my defence,26 Dec 2009, 1:44PM
'an interesting, thoughtful analysis. Fortunately the moderators will be along any second, in that oafish, rent-a-cop way of thiers, to remove it for the same arbitrary reasons they remove random posts on every thread.
To put it succinctly, though, yes - the myth of Cold War "stability" was just that, a myth. And that's without even getting into the matter of whether "stability" isn't a bit of an overrated fetish in itself, especially if it means stability at the expense of somebody else living in nightmarish circumstances'.
Let's see.
And the deleted post was more or less on the same lines as what I have written above.
ReplyDeleteChrist, pre mod.
ReplyDeleteYou're certainly doing a good job on here though, very prolific, in depth and well researched.
Yes, it seems confirmed I'm been pre-moderated. It is pathetic and even more pathetic is the fact they probably do not understand how pathetic they are being.
ReplyDeleteBut being less pathetic myself and not thinking that these people have any sense of nuance of intelligence at all in their judgement I'll just sit it out.
Most likely I'll try the Independent or Telegraph. The reason is they might have thought my comparison of the Auschwitz theft as a relatively minor act compared with the wholsale demolition of a Red Army memorial was "offensive".
They moderate not according to principles of free speech where free means not intent on decivilising the discussion or making direct ad hominem attacks.
My view is that they want to preserve what they perceive is the papers self righteous liberal-left image for commercial reasons, to sell the brand.
The manifestation od stupid right wing bogots there does not discredit the paper. Intelligent conservatism , as corruscating as it can be, threatens that control.
They do not want their commenters above the line to be humiliated for looking very, very stupid as Lazenby did when hinting at the ideological reasons for stealing the Auschwitz sign.
And since he 'meant well' and I'm a nasty reactionary who just must have an agenda to challenge that view, based as it was without evidence, I get censored.
Craven, spineless, careeristic grovelling and smug groupthink determine the false sense of values the moderators have.