Solzhenitsyn’s righteous outrage

International Herald Tribune William Pfaff MAY 4, 2006

PARIS The defense made last week by Alexander Solzhenitsyn of Russian national independence and the Putin government’s nationalist policies has substance in it as well as anger.

When the onetime gulag prisoner and enemy of Soviet despotism returned in 1994 after 20 years of exile and self-imposed isolation in Vermont, it was to a chaotic Russia of oligarchs and mafia capitalism, which he bitterly denounced. Now he sees the Putin government as a responsible effort to lift Russia further from decline, at a time when “Western democracy is in a serious state of crisis.”

In a written interview with the newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti, he has attacked the United States and NATO for what he described as “an effort totally to encircle Russia and destroy its sovereignty.”

The 1970 Nobel laureate for literature has always been a critic of a modernity that, in his opinion, has produced a devastating dehumanization in the West, as well as in his own country under the rule of Lenin, Stalin and their successors.

In his American exile, he made it plain that the Russia he hoped to see in succession to Soviet Russia would not be the liberal capitalist state Americans hoped for (and attempted to install after the USSR’s demise, with unhappy consequences), but a Russia displaying the national and conservative Christian solidarity he sees in Russia’s past.

Today he believes that a West lost to secularism and materialism is threatening Russia: “Although it is clear that Russia, as it exists, represents no threat to NATO, the latter is methodically developing its military deployment in Eastern Europe and on Russia’s southern flank.” His interview coincided with a NATO meeting held in Bulgaria, where the Ukrainian defense minister declared his country’s “irreversible ambition” to become a NATO member.

NATO’s 2004 expansion into the Baltic states was correctly taken by the Russians as a betrayal of assurances given Moscow, following the collapse of the USSR, that NATO would not push the alliance perimeter up to the Russian frontier.

The decision to do so contributed to the creation of a new climate of what can be called a cool war with the West, further chilled by American sponsorship of the “color revolutions” in countries such as Georgia that were part of Moscow’s empire in czarist times, or like Ukraine and Belarus, which are closely related culturally and occupy an ambiguous zone of historically shifting political identity at the frontier between Orthodox and Roman Christianity.

Washington has simultaneously been cultivating political influence and extending its system of military bases into the former Soviet states of Central Asia (as well as into Romania and Bulgaria in the West).

The rationale is superficially reasonable, and the nations involved (or in Central Asia, the local despots), are delighted to have the United States and NATO as their refuge against Russian pressures, or at least (as in the Central Asian case) to find themselves able to play Washington off against Moscow.

But the question has yet to be answered in Washington as to whether the game is worth the eventual risks not only to the United States and Russia, but all the rest as well.

Russia’s support for Iran in connection with that country’s nuclear program, its diversification of energy sales to Asia, its attempt to invest in Western Europe’s energy sector, and its complaints about the West’s “unfair practices” in dealing with Russia are reactions to what is perceived as threat. Naturally, the reaction has the reciprocal effect of inspiring fear in Europe and the United States of Russian influence over Western energy supplies.

Vice President Dick Cheney is in Central Asia this week to urge Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to support pipeline projects that would reduce Russia’s energy influence. Condoleezza Rice has just been trying to convince Turkey and Greece to join pipeline plans that favor Azerbaijan to Russia’s disadvantage.

This is commercial rivalry, of course, with strategic economic implications. But when it coincides with American military expansion in Central Asia and NATO expansion on Russia’s European borders, it fits nicely into a paranoid interpretation of American and Western intentions toward Russia.

Combine that with the globally imperialist claims made in the U.S. National Security Strategy statement issued in March, proposing to change the entire international system to American advantage, and it is not hard to understand why Solzhenitsyn said what he did.

The reception in Western circles to his claim that the United States already “occupies” Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a campaign ultimately directed against Russia has been that the 87- year-old writer exaggerates.

However, as many have observed, even paranoids have real enemies.

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