Coddling Russia

In an article (subscription required) published in the Irish Times on May 14, Paul Gillespie discussed the division in Russian society that is being caused by different interpretations of that country's modern history. His analysis covered Russian author Viktor Yerofeyev's recent comments on the obvious schisms revealed by the Victory Day celebrations, and also the gloomy prognostications of Russian sociologist Lev Gudkov, who is quoted as saying: "there is nothing else left to take pride in: the disintegration of the USSR and the failure of the post-Soviet reforms, the noticeable weakening of mass hopes, and the disappearance of the illusions of perestroika have furnished the content of a traumatic experience of national failure".

All in all, a rather critical survey of present trends within the Russian Federation. At the end of the article, however, Gillespie seemed suddenly to change tack, and wrote as follows:

The excellent web-based Eurozine, which brings together and translates essays published in various European cultural magazines, deals in its current issue with how a new grand narrative of European history might be created to deal with such deep-seated disagreements.

It includes Gudkov's illuminating essay on the resurrection of Stalinism.

The historian Timothy Snyder writes that while 1945 has a constitutive meaning for the European Union and its founding states, for most of the states admitted to the Union in May 2004 it "meant a transition from one occupation to another, from Nazi rule to Soviet rule".

Eastern Europeans also know "that German occupation policies were incomparably more savage in eastern Europe than in the west. They know that the Holocaust does not nearly exhaust the record of German mass murder of civilians."

It will require considerable humility and a willingness to learn for western Europeans to accept this alternative eastern narrative - even if they cannot accept an equals sign between Stalin and Hitler.

This was acknowledged in the EU statement which said 1989, not 1945, represents the end of dictatorship for many million of Europeans.

But the EU has to temper this acknowledgment with a deep sensitivity to Russia's identity crisis by keeping lines of communication, politics, economics and culture open to its people, as was partly addressed in this week's agreement in Moscow.

Making an enemy of Russia by excluding it would betray that country's European heritage and its enlightened public opinion which takes that so seriously.

It would lay down dangerous paths for the future by not understanding the past.

With considerable justification, Estonian parliamentarian Mari-Ann Kelam makes this comment:

I strongly disagree with the conclusion of this otherwise interesting article... - we MUST NOT coddle Russia. The fact that Russia is the only significant country to have dropped from "partly free" to "not free" on Freedom House's list in December 2004 is stark proof of the dismaying results of coddling Russia. We must take a firm stance and not lie to the Russians. Unfortunately the West continues to give mixed signals to Putin, letting him live in this delusion that he's "fooled the West." Russia is a threat to democratic states in the region and the threat will only grow worse. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia are all front-line states which are being undermined by Putin's government and quasi-private surrogates like the energy companies Gazprom and LUKoil, etc.