Constantine Pleshakov: The Crimean Nexus

What I saw made me very angry, because that had been my home. Yet Russia at the time was not faring much better, and as all the ex-Soviets had learned the hard way, transition to a market economy is painful and ugly. Its pains, I thought, were not something Crimea, the rest of Ukraine, or Russia would be unable to outgrow. I don’t think anyone believed war would come next.

There seems to be a growing international consensus regarding the origins of the crisis in the east: the involved parties sleepwalked into it, having misinterpreted each other’s agendas. Miscommunication that persistent must have had a method to it. To deconstruct it, we shall look at both the approximations—half-truths and honest mistakes—and controversies surrounding basic concepts of international relations, such as spheres of influence. [1] “Ukraine: UK and EU Badly Misread Russia,” BBC, February 20, 2015, www.bbc.com/news/uk-31545744 (retrieved February 20, 2015).

Possibly the biggest approximation fueling the conflict in the east has been a dichotomous approach to almost every aspect: historical, political, cultural, personal. The “us versus them” outlook that prevails in Ukraine, Russia, and the United States turns amorphousness into concrete, gray areas into black-and-white, a quilt into brick.

Too often the current clash between Moscow and Kiev gets presented as a battle between good and evil, with all the complexities, inconsistencies, and absurdities reduced to a Harry Potter level of analysis: Russian president Vladimir Putin is Lord Voldemort, the United States is Dumbledore, and Ukraine takes the role of Harry Potter, the boy who lived. One could only wish the protagonists and their agendas were that well defined.

To begin with, not two but three worlds meet (or, if you prefer, clash) in Ukraine: European, Russian, and Turkic. Like every other stretch of the Black Sea coast, southern Ukraine used to be part of the Ottoman Empire (it was not for nothing that the Black Sea was known as the Ottoman Lake). Yet in each narrative—Ukrainian, Russian, and American—it is “Russia against the West,” the adversaries solid, fully formed, definite in their values and intentions. In this discourse, the only sort of agency Ukraine has is the capacity to choose between the two, to eventually join the “right” side. This strange duality misjudges the nature of the protagonists in the conflict and misplaces its context.

Depending on where Ukrainian politicians currently stand on NATO and the European Union, U.S. media tend to describe them as either “pro-Western” good people or “pro-Russian” bad types. The classification is unfortunate, as it originates in the false premise that the main ambition of Ukrainian leaders is to choose between Russia and the West. Of course, this has never been the case. In Ukraine, as anywhere else, politicians exhibit cold pragmatism, healthy manipulative skills, and a praiseworthy inclination to exploit the animosity between great powers to its fullest.

In the vernacular of U.S. media or, for that matter, academia, “pro-Western,” or “Westernized” is a compliment, synonymous with “reform” and “progress,” even when the signs of Westernization cited and praised are oddly superficial: beer parties in post-Saddam Baghdad, miniskirts in post-Taliban Kabul, McDonald’s in post-Soviet Moscow.

Strictly speaking, the term “pro-Western” should not really be part of the foreign policy lexicon: when calling someone “pro-Western,” do we mean that he or she is pro-U.S., pro-France, or pro-Germany? Pro-E.U. or pro-NATO? Also, aren’t “Western values” time- and place-specific? Is support of, say, gay rights now a mandatory part of being pro-Western? Questions of this sort never end.

With remarkable ease, we classify political movements and public figures in the developing world as either anti- or pro-Western, mistaking intention for commitment and promises for achievements. Not surprisingly, each time a “pro-Western reformer” switches ideological gears or proves corrupt, it leads to handwringing, disillusionment, and a rushed search for a new favorite.

This vicious cycle brings to mind a warning given to the Solidarity movement of the 1980s by the old wise man of Polish politics, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński: “It’s not a question of wanting to change the leaders, it’s they who must change. We must make sure—and I make this comparison quite deliberately—that one gang of robbers doesn’t steal the keys of the state treasury from another similar gang.” [2] The Book of Lech Walesa (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 144.

The second approximation dimming our understanding of the crisis is related to nation-building. Every modern state in Eastern Europe is young; all got carved from the territory of a fading empire—Austria-Hungary, Germany, Turkey, Russia. Many descend from greater and mightier entities. Sixteenth-century Poland, for example, was the equal of France, and in the 1610s Polish troops occupied Moscow. Riches-to-rags journeys like that make territorial disputes endemic to the region.

“Self-determination,” introduced to Europe by President Woodrow Wilson, was neither comprehensible nor practical. Wilson’s own secretary of state, Robert Lansing, posed questions not fully answered a century later: “When the President talks of ‘self-determination’ what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community?” Defining units worthy of self-determination was just one problem among many. As the decision lay with foreign sponsors naturally swayed by self-interest and prejudice, verdicts were arbitrary. Wilson was a champion of independent Poland, but he wanted Ukraine to stay within an undivided, albeit already Communist, Russia. Lansing found the policy geopolitically sound, yet warned that cases like that turned self-determination into a mere phrase: “It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives.” In cases of “submerged” nations recognized by foreign sponsors, there was no way of establishing their borders in a manner that would be universally found fair because of the past migrations, cleansings, and repatriations. An American participant in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that granted nationhood to several Eastern European nations, including two abortive projects—Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia—wrote: “The ‘submerged nations’ are coming to the surface and as soon as they appear, they fly at somebody’s throat.” [3] Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 99–100; Tasker Bliss quoted in Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 58.

Conflicts among formerly “submerged nations” have been going on for more than a century, and the Balkan Wars set the scene for World War I. After World War II, stiffened by the military blocs of the Cold War era, they temporarily reduced in intensity, yet it is still inaccurate to insist, as Robert Kagan does, that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Crimea was the first time since World War II that a nation in Europe had engaged in territorial conquest.” In 1974, Turkey and Greece went to war over Cyprus, and the island has been divided into “pro-Turkish” and “pro-Greek” parts ever since. [4] Kagan, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire.”

Many experts, underestimating the difficulties of nation-building in Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet euphoria, also failed to see that Russia was wrestling with nation-building just as painfully as, say, Serbia.