Vladimir Putin's new plan for world domination
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Mary Wakefield and Freddy Gray discuss Putin's master plan
It’s been a generation or so since Russians were in the business of shaping the destiny of the world, and most of us have forgotten how good they used to be at it. For much of the last century Moscow fuelled — and often won — the West’s ideological and culture wars. In the 1930s, brilliant operatives like Willi Muenzenberg convinced ‘useful idiots’ to join anti-fascist organisations that were in reality fronts for the Soviet-backed Communist International. Even in the twilight years of the Soviet Union the KGB was highly successful at orchestrating nuclear disarmament movements and trade unionism across the West.
Now, after two decades in the economic basket, Russia is decisively back as an ideological force in the world — this time as a champion of conservative values. In his annual state of the nation speech to Russia’s parliament in December, Vladimir Putin assured conservatives around the world that Russia was ready and willing to stand up for ‘family values’ against a tide of liberal, western, pro-gay propaganda ‘that asks us to accept without question the equality of good and evil’. Russia, he promised, will ‘defend traditional values that have made up the spiritual and moral foundation of civilisation in every nation for thousands of years’. Crucially, Putin made it clear that his message was directed not only at Russians — who have already been protected from ‘promotion of non-traditional relationships’ by recent legislation — but for ‘more and more people across the world who support our position’.
He’s on to something. Ukraine’s near-revolutionary turmoil this week pits East versus West — but it’s also a culture war between social conservatives and social liberals. The forces against the government in Kiev tend to be aligned with the EU and modern ‘democratic values’, including gay rights; whereas government supporters tend to be more Russophile and their banners include ones that say ‘EURO = HOMO’. These are precisely the battle lines on which Putin has raised his conservative ideological standard.
A recent report by the Centre for Strategic Communications, a Kremlin-connected think tank, neatly summarised Putin’s ambition: it’s entitled ‘Putin: World Conservatism’s New Leader’. The report argues that large, silent majorities around the world favour traditional family values over feminism and gay rights — and that Putin is their natural leader. ‘The Kremlin apparently believes it has found the ultimate wedge issue to unite its supporters and divide its opponents, both in Russia and the West, and garner support in the developing world,’ says Radio Free Europe’s Brian Whitmore. ‘They seem to believe they have found the ideology that will return Russia to its rightful place as a great power with a messianic mission and the ability to win hearts and minds globally.’
Putin’s siren call has found support in some unexpected quarters. The conservative American commentator — and one-time arch anti-communist — Pat Buchanan was one of the architects of the Reagan-era ‘Moral Majority’ movement which heralded the rise of the Christian right as a political force. Now he’s full of praise for Putin’s ‘paleo-conservative moment’. The great ideological struggle of the 21st century will be between ‘conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite’, Buchanan wrote in a recent blog post. ‘While much of American and western media dismiss him as an authoritarian and reactionary, a throwback, Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans.’ The Illinois-based World Congress of Families, an organisation that promotes family values, has already accepted an invitation to hold its eighth annual International Congress in Moscow. ‘Russia could be a great ally for conservatives, on issues like defending the family, abortions, even strengthening marriage and promoting more children,’ the Congress of Families managing director Larry Jacobs told the state-run RIA news agency.
But the Kremlin’s true target audience is not on the right-wing fringes of western politics but people in what was once called the Soviet sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union, Middle East and Africa. Russian diplomats and academics have taken a leading role in promoting an anti-gay-rights resolution in the United Nations’ Human Rights Council in Geneva, building a coalition of conservative nations behind a resolution declaring that human rights had to be subordinate to ‘traditional values and cultural sovereignty’. (In 2011 the US backed a resolution explicitly protecting sexual minorities under the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights — but Russia stepped in to lead the counteroffensive.) ‘Russia has been using this issue to develop a constituency in Muslim and African countries,’ says Mark Gevisser, an Open Society Fellow who is writing a book on the global debate on gay rights. ‘This brand of ideological moral conservatism was originally minted in the US. It is highly ironic that these countries are mounting an anti-western crusade using a western tool.’ Moscow plays on opposition to gay rights most effectively closer to home. Last November, when it looked like the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was close to signing an Association Agreement with the European Union, billboards appeared across the country warning that the ‘EU means legalising same-sex marriage’. The campaign was paid for by Ukraine’s Choice, a group associated with the Kremlin-connected politician and businessman Viktor Medvedchuk.
But Putin’s new mission goes deeper than political opportunism. Like the old Communist International, or Comintern, in its day, Moscow is again building an international ideological alliance. The Comintern sought to bring ‘progressives’ and left-wingers of every stripe into Moscow’s ideological big tent; Putin is pitching for moral leadership of all conservatives who dislike liberal values. And again, like the Comintern, Putin appears convinced that he is embarking on a world-historical mission. It’s certainly true that such a moral mission has deep roots in Russian history. Many previous occupants of the Kremlin have set themselves up as defenders of orthodoxy and autocracy — notably Nicholas I, the ‘gendarme of Europe’, and the arch-conservative Alexander III. Putin quoted the 19th-century conservative thinker Nikolai Berdyaev in his Duma speech. ‘The point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward,’ Putin said, ‘but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.’
It would be easy to dismiss Putin’s conservative Comintern as another Sochi-style vanity project if it weren’t for the fact that Russia’s hard power is growing in parallel with its soft power. For the first time in a generation Moscow called the shots on a major international diplomatic issue last year, when Sergei Lavrov’s plan to supervise Syria’s chemical weapons disarmament derailed US plans for military strikes on Damascus. Over recent years Moscow unsuccessfully backed local despots in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, and Libya — and they lost their heads, just like old Soviet clients from Afghanistan to Yugoslavia. But with Syria that run of failure is finally changing. Moscow’s diplomatic protection in the UN, backed by Russian weapons, intelligence and military expertise, finally means something again. If Harry Truman wanted to make the US the arsenal of democracy, then Putin seems to have a similar plan for Russia to be the arsenal of reaction.
There’s a third plank to Russia’s ambitious programme to shape the world in its image: an ongoing campaign to redesign the global architecture of the internet to allow more control by individual states. Since the foundation of the world wide web, its effective control centre has been at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — known as ICANN, the non-profit organisation that assigns internet addresses and traffic routes based in Los Angeles, California. Russia has long demanded that ICANN be moved out of the US — and has been quick to seize on the leaks of the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s reports as a tool to topple the US from the moral high ground of internet user freedom and embarrass Washington.
Last November a delegation of Russian senators and Foreign Ministry officials paid an official visit to the US to complain to American service providers for failing to guarantee user privacy. They also renewed demands to reform ICANN. A logical enough demand, on the face of it, after Snowden’s revelations revealed deeply flawed oversight systems over America’s spies. But the problem with dismantling ICANN is that it could lead to an increase in the control allowed to individual states not only over their own internet space — which they have already — but over the entire world wide web. In other words, Russia could block someone it doesn’t like in Germany by invoking an anti-terror clause and shutting down opponents’ domain name server, or DNS, the basic address book of the internet. Without a DNS, web pages become unfindable and effectively disappear.
The issue of who controls the internet will be debated at a major international conference next year, the biggest such confab since 2005. Strategically, Russia has clearly set its sights on two goals: wresting control of the internet away from the US, and creating a new definition of ‘cyber-terrorism’ that’s as loose as its own legislation on ‘extremism’, which has recently been used to prosecute eco-activists, peaceful protestors, independent media outlets and gay activists. Russia’s suggestion is to shift control of the internet away from ICANN to the International Telecommunication Union or ITU, the United Nations agency responsible for co-ordinating global use of the radio spectrum and satellite orbits. The ITU’s basic charter guarantees freedom of access to the internet — except, crucially, in cases of cyber–terrorism. Over the last ten years Russia has tried three times in the UN and once in the Organisation on Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to push through resolutions on cyber terror on the internet. But such legislation has been opposed by the US and Europe because ‘the only practical implications of such a move would be to allow countries to suppress dissent,’ says Alexander Klimburg, an adviser on cyber security to the OSCE.
Conservative values, international diplomacy, the architecture of the internet: apparently diverse areas where Russia is exercising international influence. They are all united by a common theme, the same one that is trumpeted very plainly by the Sochi Games: Russia is back as a major global player, and doesn’t care how much it costs to show it. The scheme has feet of clay, of course, as does Putin’s rule itself, insofar as it is founded on sky-high energy prices which are already beginning to tumble under the assaults of cheap shale gas and alternative energy. But for the time being at least, Putin has the means and now the plan to project Russian power, both hard and soft, beyond Russia’s borders for the first time since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 22 February 2014
Flight Of The Bumblebee - Rimsky-Korsakov
...the relentless anti-Americanism on state media was in the past dismissed as crude propaganda that served a transparent political purpose but appeared now to reflect the actual worldview of the Kremlin. “It’s a catastrophe for Ukraine and for Russia,” he said. “The problem is that quite a few people in Russia don’t understand the consequences. They believe the country is strong and can do whatever it wants to do.”
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin has left little doubt he intends to cripple Ukraine’s new government, forcing it to make concessions or face the de facto partition of areas populated predominantly by ethnic Russians, from the Crimea to Odessa to the industrial heartland in the east.
That strategy has been pursued aggressively by subterfuge, propaganda and bold military threat, taking aim as much at the United States and its allies in Europe as Ukraine itself. The pivotal question now for Kiev and Western capitals, is how boldly Mr. Putin continues to push his agenda, risking a more heated military and diplomatic conflict.
So far, the Kremlin has shown no sign of yielding to international pressure — but it also has not taken the most provocative step yet, openly ordering Russian troops to reinforce those already in Crimea and expand its incursion into southern or eastern Ukraine.
Asked on Sunday about President Obama’s suspension of preparations to attend the Group of 8 summit meeting scheduled for June in Sochi — along with Canada, France and Britain — Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, replied cuttingly and dismissively. “It’s not a minus for Russia,” he said. “It will be a minus for the G-8.”
Mr. Putin has yet to make public remarks on the crisis in Ukraine, leaving his ultimate goals uncertain and unpredictable. Still, his strategy is aimed at blunting the impact of a popular uprising that sought to push the country away from Russia and deepen ties with Europe, and Mr. Putin has already left the fledgling government disorganized, discredited and forced to compromise on terms that would keep the country firmly within Russia’s sphere of influence, especially regarding the Crimea peninsula.
The Kremlin’s pledge to protect compatriots in Ukraine from suppression of a Western-minded majority mirrors Russia’s role in other disputed territories of the former Soviet republics over the years, including Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Those two breakaway regions of Georgia survived in a diplomatic limbo after the collapse of the Soviet Union with overt and covert Kremlin pressure until war erupted in 2008 and Russia routed ill-prepared Georgian troops.
Russia brushed aside strong warnings from the United States and others at the time and recognized them as independent countries — and paid little price for it in the long run. Mr. Putin appears to be calculating again that Russia is too important for other countries to respond more forcefully, despite warnings like those by Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday that the United States would consider an array of sanctions that could include freezing assets and travel of senior officials here.
“As brilliant as the man is, he has only one pattern,” Nina L. Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School in New York, said of Mr. Putin. Ms. Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Nikita S. Khrushchev, whose decision to cede Crimea to Kiev’s jurisdiction instead of Moscow’s in 1954 is a disputed legacy at the heart of Russia’s claims in Ukraine, added, “It’s a clever pattern, but he has only one.”
The stakes in Ukraine are, however, much higher than the war with Georgia. And given Ukraine’s strategic position in the center of Europe, so are the risks. Russia has significant trade with Ukraine, but even more so with Europe. Its gas monopoly, Gazprom, has already made it clear that it was prepared to forgo discounts on natural gas that Russia offered the government of President Viktor F. Yanukovych and to collect on the debt Ukraine already owes. As it did in 2006 and 2009, Russia could turn off the supply to Ukraine. But since its pipelines pass west through Ukraine, that would mean cutting off Russia’s largest customers in Europe, too.
Any escalation of Russia’s military intervention, especially if it meets resistance and bloodshed, will almost certainly rattle investors and plunge Russia’s unsteady economy into free fall. With the value of the ruble already falling, there was quick speculation of a rocky start when the stock market opens on Monday.
For now, such calculations appear to be secondary to the fury that the toppling of Mr. Yanukovych’s government has caused inside the Kremlin. Ukraine has deep historical, social and religious connections to Russia that are often underestimated in the United States, especially. More significantly, Mr. Putin and the close circle of aides he relies on most, view the overthrow of Mr. Yanukovych as a coup orchestrated by the West to undercut Russia’s vital interests.
Sergei Utkin, the head of the Department of Strategic Assessment, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that the relentless anti-Americanism on state media was in the past dismissed as crude propaganda that served a transparent political purpose but appeared now to reflect the actual worldview of the Kremlin. “It’s a catastrophe for Ukraine and for Russia,” he said. “The problem is that quite a few people in Russia don’t understand the consequences. They believe the country is strong and can do whatever it wants to do.”
How Mr. Putin perceives these events remains central to what happens next, experts said. Does he believe he has already succeeded by making clear that Russia has the will and the means to force its agenda in Ukraine? Or does he feel the job is only half done and that having stoked Russian nationalism, he has no choice but to plow ahead?
The deployment of Russian troops across Crimea — which Mr. Peskov refused to acknowledge — has already effectively severed Crimea from Ukrainian control, even as it provoked tense confrontation with Ukrainian troops at some bases. It allowed a new regional leader to plead for Russia’s protection and gave the Kremlin the pretense to oblige.
Ethnic Russian supporters — abetted by Russia’s secret services, according to Ukrainian and foreign officials — are now mounting demonstrations in other cities, including Kharkiv and Donetsk, that could lead to similar calls for Russian intervention.
The unanimous vote by Russia’s upper house of Parliament on Saturday night to authorize an intervention, after a debate that vilified the United States in ways reminiscent of the darkest periods of the Cold War, took place after the first Russian reinforcements had already begun arriving, according to Ukrainian and other Western officials. The vote nevertheless gave Mr. Putin a strong hand to play, threatening a much larger conventional military operation to protect “citizens and compatriots” in Ukraine, as Mr. Putin said in telephone conversations with Mr. Obama and the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, according to the Kremlin.
Mr. Peskov said that Mr. Putin had not yet ordered the operation but now had “the full array of options available to him” if the crisis worsened. He emphasized that Russia supported a unified Ukraine, but also argued that the country’s new leaders had violated the agreement brokered by the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland to establish a unity government that would leave Mr. Yanukovych in place as president until new elections in December.
He suggested a diplomatic resolution would begin with a return to the terms of those agreements. That would mean the dismissal of the new interim government that the United States and others have already endorsed and the return of Mr. Yanukovych, who appeared on Friday at a surreal news conference in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don after dropping out of sight for a week. “He may be the last man to present himself for the presidency,” Mr. Peskov said, reflecting the greatly diminished reputation of Mr. Yanukovych in Moscow now, “but he is the legitimate one.”
For now, though, with a large-scale military exercise in western Russian already underway, the country felt very much on a war footing. By Sunday, an information campaign swept like an orchestrated gust through state-controlled news media. There were frenetic reports of clashes in Ukraine, of fascist threats to ethnic Russians and of the flight — entirely unsubstantiated — of 675,000 Ukrainians crossing Russia’s frontier as refugees. (One channel, in fact, showed a short line of cars at Ukraine’s border with Poland, not Russia.)...
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