Back in the USSR
Here's an article from The New Yorker magazine by David Remnick which features the thoughts of a Moscow-based journalist, Ulyana Skoibeda, who is an ardent admirer of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin.
Now the author of the phrase "turning liberals into lampshades" may since have apologised for using such vile language to make a political point.
Nonetheless it provides and interesting insight into the mindset of those (including President Putin) who regard glasnost and perestroika as a "disgrace" - even though these policies from the time of Mikhail Gorbachev were intended to bring about more openness and political freedom within the old Soviet Union.
So if you ask me the political project of President Putin and his allies is too turn the clock back, filled by the paranoia of people like Ulyana Skoibeda and Aleksandr Prokhanov.
PUTIN’S NIGHTINGALES
POSTED BY DAVID REMNICK - The New Yorker
When she was very young, the Moscow-based journalist Ulyana Skoibeda read a biography of Margaret Mitchell. “Gone with the Wind” has always been popular in Russia. The detail that stuck in her memory was that Mitchell, a native of Atlanta, Georgia, said she felt that she had grown up in “a conquered country.”
Last week, Skoibeda published a column in Komsomolskaya Pravda, the most popular daily in Russia, called “I No Longer Live in a Conquered Country.” Of the countless Russian articles, podcasts, and television clips that I’ve absorbed in the past few months of crisis, none strikes me as more emblematic of the emotions of the moment—Vladimir Putin’s moment—than Skoibeda’s exercise in fevered nostalgia and nationalist revival.
Skoibeda’s taste in metaphor is vile. Last year, in another column, she wrote, “Sometimes you’re sorry that the Nazis didn’t turn the forebearers of today’s liberals into lampshades.” Skoibeda came of age in the wake of the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, and in her recent column she portrays herself as the parent of an innocent child who is confused by the defeat of the Motherland. Why, her son asks, has the United States “attacked” Syria? Why are Russians so interested in the value of the dollar? And why did the U.S.S.R. collapse? Did you actually live in the U.S.S.R.? The child’s grandmother talks with pride about the glories of Soviet industry, “and now …” And all those questions, all those despairing statements of fact, she writes, lead to one humbling certainty: “They conquered us!”
Yes, things began to change for the better in the aughts, after the resignation of Boris Yeltsin and the rise of Vladimir Putin, Skoibeda writes. But, she says, it was not until the invasion of Crimea, and Putin’s triumphant, resentful speech in Russia’s defense that followed it, that she and the country could feel truly emboldened and transformed: “When I heard Putin’s Crimea speech, I hugged my son and told him, ‘You will remember this for the rest of your life.’ ” Suddenly, with this burst of pride, her column takes on a martial tone, bristling with a desire to go back a generation, if not more, and to embrace old values under an old banner: in her terms, the U.S.S.R. stands for everything decent, self-denying, and magnificent:
Confrontation with the whole world for the sake of our own truth and our interests—this is the U.S.S.R….To be ready to live in poverty—this is the U.S.S.R….When all the people are ready to wear peasant boots for the sake of saving the Crimea, when it is more important not to forsake our brothers than to have thirty different kinds of sausage in the refrigerator, when we have the disgrace of perestroika past us and the people are unafraid of the Iron Curtain…. It may be sad that Russia was expelled from the G8, but this is how—in isolation—the U.S.S.R. always lived.
It turns out, Skoibeda tells the reader, that the Russian Army and its intelligence services have not collapsed. The country that was once great and powerful is great and powerful once more. “The Soviet Union, like the phoenix, has been reborn,” she writes. “It is not Crimea that has returned. It is we who have returned. Home. To the U.S.S.R.”
Skoibeda apologized for her “lampshade” column last year, but her most recent effort is in tune with the times and with the demands of power. Her “Gone with the Wind”-style nostalgia may sound parodic to an American ear, but it is not—it is only a somewhat heightened example of the rhetoric in Russia’s loyal media (i.e., almost all of it), in the letters of “support” to the Kremlin from various cultural organizations, and at state-organized demonstrations.
All winter, Putin has been tightening his hold on the few remaining media outlets that have not fallen into line—TV Rain, Echo of Moscow radio, and Internet news sites like Lenta.ru. He dismantled the relatively professional RIA Novosti news agency and replaced it with a new entity, Rossiya Sogodnya (Russia Today), headed by Dmitri Kiselyov, the host of a program called “News of the Week.” Kiselyov is an unforgiving propagandist. When talking about the Maidan—the square that was the scene of the main anti-government demonstrations in Kiev—well before the Crimean crisis, Kiselyov said, “And what is Maidan? A very small dot on the body of Ukraine. If you burn it with a soldering iron, it will hurt. But if you apply the correct political technology—bring it to the point of overheating, then show it through the magnifying glass of TV and the Internet to create the impression that the whole country is now supposedly like this—it may prove to be fatal. In fact, Ukraine is more complicated than Maidan.”
One nationalist journalist who has recently enjoyed a kind of renaissance is Aleksandr Prokhanov, who was so close to the old Soviet power structures that he was known as “the nightingale of the General Staff.” Prokhanov’s message has never changed: the West, particularly the United States, worked with Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin to destroy the Soviet Union—part of a centuries-long crusade to undermine the greatness of the Russian state. For decades, Prokhanov published a string of articles and edited newspapers, such as Dyen (The Day) and Zavtra (Tomorrow), which were filled with anti-Western, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Recently, he joined with Skoibeda in the rejoicing about the recapture of Crimea and Putin’s speech.
Prokhanov, who has been a frequent guest on Russian talk shows, seems unchanged from when I first met him, a generation ago. When I visited him after the collapse of the K.G.B.-led coup against Gorbachev, in 1991, and the subsequent fall of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, Prokhanov looked at me, the American, and said, “You did it! And how do I know? I have friends at Langley, at the State Department, and at the RANDCorporation. The general concept was yours—the C.I.A.’s. I am sure of it. The process was regulated and designed by your people. The so-called leaders of the coup were pushed forward and then betrayed. They were left to be torn to pieces by public opinion…. In this whole drama, only the C.I.A. was smart.”
For a generation, Prokhanov carried this message, and, often enough, he was either ignored or condemned. Now, as he operates in the enclosed universe of Russian state media, in a moment of resentful nationalism encouraged at the highest level, the nightingale sings a mainstream tune.
Above: Vladimir Putin meets the newly promoted top officers from various branches of the Russian armed forces and Interor Ministry; Moscow, March 28, 2014. Photograph by Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty.
I started reading this opinion piece in The Guardian by Seumas Milne but when I got to the paragraph (in bold) about the 'disastrous' break-up of the former Soviet Union I rather lost interest, I have to say.
Because I could understand why someone like Seumas was a political apologist for the old Soviet Union - lots of people on the left were in those days and saw the world in ideological terms as a battle between unfettered Capitalism and state-controlled Socialism.
But the world has since moved on then and despite the recent problems of the global economic recession, no serious politician is now suggests that anything other than a market based system is the basis for organising a modern, productive economy.
Not even China or Russia disagree these days although their political and social systems leave much to be desired as far as civil rights and freedom of expression are concerned.
So having been an apologist for the old Soviet Union what puzzles me is why Seumas should be such an admirer of Russia when it is such a repressive capitalist country operating under a harsh political system - where minority groups are harassed and punished on a regular basis?
If anything, Russia is practising and even more brutal and exploitative version of capitalism under Valdimir Putin and the Russian oligarchs.
And the fact of the matter is that the former satellite countries of the Soviet Union such as Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria and Slovakia (which borders Ukraine) have all become much more democratic and liberal since shaking off Soviet domination.
Whereas Russia, the member states of the Russian Fedearation and satellites countries like Belarus have all gone the other way - they have all become less democratic and more illiberal.
In the case of Iraq of course, prior to any military action being taken there were years of wrangling at the United Nations in an effort to knock some diplomatic sense into the vile Saddam regime.
Yet Seumas has nothing critical to say about the fact that President Putin has ordered boots on the ground in Ukraine at the drop of a hat under the pretext of fascist political activity - while the Dutch UN special envoy (Robert Serry) was chased our of Crimea after being threatened by armed men, so who's kidding who here?
If you ask me Seumas Milne is really arguing for the political rebirth of this beloved Soviet Union - a kind of Soviet Reunion if you like, under the aegis of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation.
The clash in Crimea is the fruit of western expansion
The external struggle to dominate Ukraine has put fascists in power and brought the country to the brink of conflict
By Seumas Milne
Troops under Russian command fire weapons into the air in Lubimovka, Ukraine. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Diplomatic pronouncements are renowned for hypocrisy and double standards. But western denunciations of Russian intervention in Crimea have reached new depths of self parody. The so far bloodless incursion is an "incredible act of aggression", US secretary of state John Kerry declared. In the 21st century you just don't invade countries on a "completely trumped-up pretext", he insisted, as US allies agreed that it had been an unacceptable breach of international law, for which there will be "costs".
That the states which launched the greatest act of unprovoked aggression in modern history on a trumped-up pretext – against Iraq, in an illegal war now estimated to have killed 500,000, along with the invasion of Afghanistan, bloody regime change in Libya, and the killing of thousands in drone attacks on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, all without UN authorisation – should make such claims is beyond absurdity.
It's not just that western aggression and lawless killing is on another scale entirely from anything Russia appears to have contemplated, let alone carried out – removing any credible basis for the US and its allies to rail against Russian transgressions. But the western powers have also played a central role in creating the Ukraine crisis in the first place.
The US and European powers openly sponsored the protests to oust the corrupt but elected Viktor Yanukovych government, which were triggered by controversy over an all-or-nothing EU agreement which would have excluded economic association with Russia.
In her notorious "fuck the EU" phone call leaked last month, the US official Victoria Nuland can be heard laying down the shape of a post-Yanukovych government – much of which was then turned into reality when he was overthrown after the escalation of violence a couple of weeks later.
The president had by then lost political authority, but his overnight impeachment was certainly constitutionally dubious. In his place agovernment of oligarchs, neoliberal Orange Revolution retreads and neofascists has been installed, one of whose first acts was to try and remove the official status of Russian, spoken by a majority in parts of the south and east, as moves were made to ban the Communist party, which won 13% of the vote at the last election.
It has been claimed that the role of fascists in the demonstrations has been exaggerated by Russian propaganda to justify Vladimir Putin's manoeuvres in Crimea. The reality is alarming enough to need no exaggeration. Activists report that the far right made up around a third of the protesters, but they were decisive in armed confrontations with the police.
Fascist gangs now patrol the streets. But they are also in Kiev's corridors of power. The far right Svoboda party, whose leader has denounced the "criminal activities" of "organised Jewry" and which was condemned by the European parliament for its "racist and antisemitic views", has five ministerial posts in the new government, including deputy prime minister and prosecutor general. The leader of the even more extreme Right Sector, at the heart of the street violence, is now Ukraine's deputy national security chief.
Neo-Nazis in office is a first in post-war Europe. But this is the unelected government now backed by the US and EU. And in a contemptuous rebuff to the ordinary Ukrainians who protested against corruption and hoped for real change, the new administration has appointed two billionaire oligarchs – one who runs his business from Switzerland – to be the new governors of the eastern cities of Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk. Meanwhile, the IMF is preparing an eye-watering austerity plan for the tanking Ukrainian economy which can only swell poverty and unemployment.
From a longer-term perspective, the crisis in Ukraine is a product of the disastrous Versailles-style break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. As in Yugoslavia, people who were content to be a national minority in an internal administrative unit of a multinational state – Russians in Soviet Ukraine, South Ossetians in Soviet Georgia – felt very differently when those units became states for which they felt little loyalty.
In the case of Crimea, which was only transferred to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, that is clearly true for the Russian majority. And contrary to undertakings given at the time, the US and its allies have since relentlessly expanded Nato up to Russia's borders, incorporating nine former Warsaw Pact states and three former Soviet republics into what is effectively an anti-Russian military alliance in Europe. The European association agreement which provoked the Ukrainian crisis also included clauses to integrate Ukraine into the EU defence structure.
That western military expansion was first brought to a halt in 2008 when the US client state of Georgia attacked Russian forces in the contested territory of South Ossetia and was driven out. The short but bloody conflict signalled the end of George Bush's unipolar world in which the US empire would enforce its will without challenge on every continent.
Given that background, it is hardly surprising that Russia has acted to stop the more strategically sensitive and neuralgic Ukraine falling decisively into the western camp, especially given that Russia's only major warm-water naval base is in Crimea.
Clearly, Putin's justifications for intervention – "humanitarian" protection for Russians and an appeal by the deposed president – are legally and politically flaky, even if nothing like on the scale of "weapons of mass destruction". Nor does Putin's conservative nationalism or oligarchic regime have much wider international appeal.
But Russia's role as a limited counterweight to unilateral western power certainly does. And in a world where the US, Britain, France and their allies have turned international lawlessness with a moral veneer into a permanent routine, others are bound to try the same game.
Fortunately, the only shots fired by Russian forces at this point have been into the air. But the dangers of escalating foreign intervention are obvious. What is needed instead is a negotiated settlement for Ukraine, including a broad-based government in Kiev shorn of fascists; a federal constitution that guarantees regional autonomy; economic support that doesn't pauperise the majority; and a chance for people in Crimea to choose their own future. Anything else risks spreading the conflict.
Here's another offering from the Guardian's comment editor, Seumas Milne, who continues his very one-sided writings which condemn America, Britain and other western countries at every opportunity - yet have nothing to say about the vile regimes which previously controlled Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
I discovered only recently that privately educated Seumas was the former editor of the Straight Left magazine - the voice of a ridiculously pro-Soviet sect within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) during the 1980s.
So I wonder what Straight Left and/or Seumas had to say about the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1982 because I, for one, would find that very interesting - as background to his relentless criticism of the west.
In any event, I hardly agree with a word of what Seumas has to say - his reference to the 'justification' used by the killers of Drummer Lee Rigby seem ridiculous to me and no more justified than the reasons given by Anders Breivik for committing mass murder in Norway.
Does Seumas, for example, agree with Michael Adebolajo that Allah chose the off-duty, unarmed soldier - and compelled them to run his victim down with a car before attempting to cut off his head?
I think not, but why let a casual throwaway reference - get in the way of a good story.
As for the rest of his article, Seumas ignores the fact that al-Qaeda launched its murderous terrorist attack on 9/11 from a safe haven in Afghanistan where the Taliban allowed the group to operate freely, so simply sitting back and doing nothing was never an option from an invasion that was supported by the United Nations.
In Libya, the former Gaddafi regime (a former ally of the Soviet Union of course) was about to commit mass murder against the country's internal opposition before western countries intervened - yet again the state of the country is down the the 'west' rather than the need for totalitarian, often tribal and religious, states to embrace democratic reforms based on sharing political power and respecting minority rights.
As far as I can see, according to the word Seumas inhabits the 'west' is responsible for all of the problems of the world and never does right for doing wrong - presumably even in the former Yugoslavia (a former Soviet satellite state) - where ethnic cleansing and mass murder was prevented only by the threat and use of military action by NATO.
The new and peaceful countries which have emerged from the former Yugoslavia - Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia and Croatia - would no doubt beg to disagree with Seumas and his one-dimensional analysis about the pros and cons of intervention against tyrannical regimes.
Many years ago I used to think of the followers of Straight Left as supporters of a one dimensional, 'flat earth' politics - and all this time later I've heard nothing to change my mind.
When she was very young, the Moscow-based journalist Ulyana Skoibeda read a biography of Margaret Mitchell. “Gone with the Wind” has always been popular in Russia. The detail that stuck in her memory was that Mitchell, a native of Atlanta, Georgia, said she felt that she had grown up in “a conquered country.”
Last week, Skoibeda published a column in Komsomolskaya Pravda, the most popular daily in Russia, called “I No Longer Live in a Conquered Country.” Of the countless Russian articles, podcasts, and television clips that I’ve absorbed in the past few months of crisis, none strikes me as more emblematic of the emotions of the moment—Vladimir Putin’s moment—than Skoibeda’s exercise in fevered nostalgia and nationalist revival.
Skoibeda’s taste in metaphor is vile. Last year, in another column, she wrote, “Sometimes you’re sorry that the Nazis didn’t turn the forebearers of today’s liberals into lampshades.” Skoibeda came of age in the wake of the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Soviet Union, and in her recent column she portrays herself as the parent of an innocent child who is confused by the defeat of the Motherland. Why, her son asks, has the United States “attacked” Syria? Why are Russians so interested in the value of the dollar? And why did the U.S.S.R. collapse? Did you actually live in the U.S.S.R.? The child’s grandmother talks with pride about the glories of Soviet industry, “and now …” And all those questions, all those despairing statements of fact, she writes, lead to one humbling certainty: “They conquered us!”
Yes, things began to change for the better in the aughts, after the resignation of Boris Yeltsin and the rise of Vladimir Putin, Skoibeda writes. But, she says, it was not until the invasion of Crimea, and Putin’s triumphant, resentful speech in Russia’s defense that followed it, that she and the country could feel truly emboldened and transformed: “When I heard Putin’s Crimea speech, I hugged my son and told him, ‘You will remember this for the rest of your life.’ ” Suddenly, with this burst of pride, her column takes on a martial tone, bristling with a desire to go back a generation, if not more, and to embrace old values under an old banner: in her terms, the U.S.S.R. stands for everything decent, self-denying, and magnificent:
Confrontation with the whole world for the sake of our own truth and our interests—this is the U.S.S.R….To be ready to live in poverty—this is the U.S.S.R….When all the people are ready to wear peasant boots for the sake of saving the Crimea, when it is more important not to forsake our brothers than to have thirty different kinds of sausage in the refrigerator, when we have the disgrace of perestroika past us and the people are unafraid of the Iron Curtain…. It may be sad that Russia was expelled from the G8, but this is how—in isolation—the U.S.S.R. always lived.
It turns out, Skoibeda tells the reader, that the Russian Army and its intelligence services have not collapsed. The country that was once great and powerful is great and powerful once more. “The Soviet Union, like the phoenix, has been reborn,” she writes. “It is not Crimea that has returned. It is we who have returned. Home. To the U.S.S.R.”
Skoibeda apologized for her “lampshade” column last year, but her most recent effort is in tune with the times and with the demands of power. Her “Gone with the Wind”-style nostalgia may sound parodic to an American ear, but it is not—it is only a somewhat heightened example of the rhetoric in Russia’s loyal media (i.e., almost all of it), in the letters of “support” to the Kremlin from various cultural organizations, and at state-organized demonstrations.
All winter, Putin has been tightening his hold on the few remaining media outlets that have not fallen into line—TV Rain, Echo of Moscow radio, and Internet news sites like Lenta.ru. He dismantled the relatively professional RIA Novosti news agency and replaced it with a new entity, Rossiya Sogodnya (Russia Today), headed by Dmitri Kiselyov, the host of a program called “News of the Week.” Kiselyov is an unforgiving propagandist. When talking about the Maidan—the square that was the scene of the main anti-government demonstrations in Kiev—well before the Crimean crisis, Kiselyov said, “And what is Maidan? A very small dot on the body of Ukraine. If you burn it with a soldering iron, it will hurt. But if you apply the correct political technology—bring it to the point of overheating, then show it through the magnifying glass of TV and the Internet to create the impression that the whole country is now supposedly like this—it may prove to be fatal. In fact, Ukraine is more complicated than Maidan.”
One nationalist journalist who has recently enjoyed a kind of renaissance is Aleksandr Prokhanov, who was so close to the old Soviet power structures that he was known as “the nightingale of the General Staff.” Prokhanov’s message has never changed: the West, particularly the United States, worked with Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin to destroy the Soviet Union—part of a centuries-long crusade to undermine the greatness of the Russian state. For decades, Prokhanov published a string of articles and edited newspapers, such as Dyen (The Day) and Zavtra (Tomorrow), which were filled with anti-Western, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Recently, he joined with Skoibeda in the rejoicing about the recapture of Crimea and Putin’s speech.
Prokhanov, who has been a frequent guest on Russian talk shows, seems unchanged from when I first met him, a generation ago. When I visited him after the collapse of the K.G.B.-led coup against Gorbachev, in 1991, and the subsequent fall of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, Prokhanov looked at me, the American, and said, “You did it! And how do I know? I have friends at Langley, at the State Department, and at the RANDCorporation. The general concept was yours—the C.I.A.’s. I am sure of it. The process was regulated and designed by your people. The so-called leaders of the coup were pushed forward and then betrayed. They were left to be torn to pieces by public opinion…. In this whole drama, only the C.I.A. was smart.”
For a generation, Prokhanov carried this message, and, often enough, he was either ignored or condemned. Now, as he operates in the enclosed universe of Russian state media, in a moment of resentful nationalism encouraged at the highest level, the nightingale sings a mainstream tune.
Above: Vladimir Putin meets the newly promoted top officers from various branches of the Russian armed forces and Interor Ministry; Moscow, March 28, 2014. Photograph by Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty.
Soviet Reunion (7 March 2014)
I started reading this opinion piece in The Guardian by Seumas Milne but when I got to the paragraph (in bold) about the 'disastrous' break-up of the former Soviet Union I rather lost interest, I have to say.
Because I could understand why someone like Seumas was a political apologist for the old Soviet Union - lots of people on the left were in those days and saw the world in ideological terms as a battle between unfettered Capitalism and state-controlled Socialism.
But the world has since moved on then and despite the recent problems of the global economic recession, no serious politician is now suggests that anything other than a market based system is the basis for organising a modern, productive economy.
Not even China or Russia disagree these days although their political and social systems leave much to be desired as far as civil rights and freedom of expression are concerned.
So having been an apologist for the old Soviet Union what puzzles me is why Seumas should be such an admirer of Russia when it is such a repressive capitalist country operating under a harsh political system - where minority groups are harassed and punished on a regular basis?
If anything, Russia is practising and even more brutal and exploitative version of capitalism under Valdimir Putin and the Russian oligarchs.
And the fact of the matter is that the former satellite countries of the Soviet Union such as Poland, Latvia, Bulgaria and Slovakia (which borders Ukraine) have all become much more democratic and liberal since shaking off Soviet domination.
Whereas Russia, the member states of the Russian Fedearation and satellites countries like Belarus have all gone the other way - they have all become less democratic and more illiberal.
In the case of Iraq of course, prior to any military action being taken there were years of wrangling at the United Nations in an effort to knock some diplomatic sense into the vile Saddam regime.
Yet Seumas has nothing critical to say about the fact that President Putin has ordered boots on the ground in Ukraine at the drop of a hat under the pretext of fascist political activity - while the Dutch UN special envoy (Robert Serry) was chased our of Crimea after being threatened by armed men, so who's kidding who here?
If you ask me Seumas Milne is really arguing for the political rebirth of this beloved Soviet Union - a kind of Soviet Reunion if you like, under the aegis of Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation.
The external struggle to dominate Ukraine has put fascists in power and brought the country to the brink of conflict
By Seumas Milne
Troops under Russian command fire weapons into the air in Lubimovka, Ukraine. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Diplomatic pronouncements are renowned for hypocrisy and double standards. But western denunciations of Russian intervention in Crimea have reached new depths of self parody. The so far bloodless incursion is an "incredible act of aggression", US secretary of state John Kerry declared. In the 21st century you just don't invade countries on a "completely trumped-up pretext", he insisted, as US allies agreed that it had been an unacceptable breach of international law, for which there will be "costs".
That the states which launched the greatest act of unprovoked aggression in modern history on a trumped-up pretext – against Iraq, in an illegal war now estimated to have killed 500,000, along with the invasion of Afghanistan, bloody regime change in Libya, and the killing of thousands in drone attacks on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, all without UN authorisation – should make such claims is beyond absurdity.
It's not just that western aggression and lawless killing is on another scale entirely from anything Russia appears to have contemplated, let alone carried out – removing any credible basis for the US and its allies to rail against Russian transgressions. But the western powers have also played a central role in creating the Ukraine crisis in the first place.
The US and European powers openly sponsored the protests to oust the corrupt but elected Viktor Yanukovych government, which were triggered by controversy over an all-or-nothing EU agreement which would have excluded economic association with Russia.
In her notorious "fuck the EU" phone call leaked last month, the US official Victoria Nuland can be heard laying down the shape of a post-Yanukovych government – much of which was then turned into reality when he was overthrown after the escalation of violence a couple of weeks later.
The president had by then lost political authority, but his overnight impeachment was certainly constitutionally dubious. In his place agovernment of oligarchs, neoliberal Orange Revolution retreads and neofascists has been installed, one of whose first acts was to try and remove the official status of Russian, spoken by a majority in parts of the south and east, as moves were made to ban the Communist party, which won 13% of the vote at the last election.
It has been claimed that the role of fascists in the demonstrations has been exaggerated by Russian propaganda to justify Vladimir Putin's manoeuvres in Crimea. The reality is alarming enough to need no exaggeration. Activists report that the far right made up around a third of the protesters, but they were decisive in armed confrontations with the police.
Fascist gangs now patrol the streets. But they are also in Kiev's corridors of power. The far right Svoboda party, whose leader has denounced the "criminal activities" of "organised Jewry" and which was condemned by the European parliament for its "racist and antisemitic views", has five ministerial posts in the new government, including deputy prime minister and prosecutor general. The leader of the even more extreme Right Sector, at the heart of the street violence, is now Ukraine's deputy national security chief.
Neo-Nazis in office is a first in post-war Europe. But this is the unelected government now backed by the US and EU. And in a contemptuous rebuff to the ordinary Ukrainians who protested against corruption and hoped for real change, the new administration has appointed two billionaire oligarchs – one who runs his business from Switzerland – to be the new governors of the eastern cities of Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk. Meanwhile, the IMF is preparing an eye-watering austerity plan for the tanking Ukrainian economy which can only swell poverty and unemployment.
From a longer-term perspective, the crisis in Ukraine is a product of the disastrous Versailles-style break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. As in Yugoslavia, people who were content to be a national minority in an internal administrative unit of a multinational state – Russians in Soviet Ukraine, South Ossetians in Soviet Georgia – felt very differently when those units became states for which they felt little loyalty.
In the case of Crimea, which was only transferred to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, that is clearly true for the Russian majority. And contrary to undertakings given at the time, the US and its allies have since relentlessly expanded Nato up to Russia's borders, incorporating nine former Warsaw Pact states and three former Soviet republics into what is effectively an anti-Russian military alliance in Europe. The European association agreement which provoked the Ukrainian crisis also included clauses to integrate Ukraine into the EU defence structure.
That western military expansion was first brought to a halt in 2008 when the US client state of Georgia attacked Russian forces in the contested territory of South Ossetia and was driven out. The short but bloody conflict signalled the end of George Bush's unipolar world in which the US empire would enforce its will without challenge on every continent.
Given that background, it is hardly surprising that Russia has acted to stop the more strategically sensitive and neuralgic Ukraine falling decisively into the western camp, especially given that Russia's only major warm-water naval base is in Crimea.
Clearly, Putin's justifications for intervention – "humanitarian" protection for Russians and an appeal by the deposed president – are legally and politically flaky, even if nothing like on the scale of "weapons of mass destruction". Nor does Putin's conservative nationalism or oligarchic regime have much wider international appeal.
But Russia's role as a limited counterweight to unilateral western power certainly does. And in a world where the US, Britain, France and their allies have turned international lawlessness with a moral veneer into a permanent routine, others are bound to try the same game.
Fortunately, the only shots fired by Russian forces at this point have been into the air. But the dangers of escalating foreign intervention are obvious. What is needed instead is a negotiated settlement for Ukraine, including a broad-based government in Kiev shorn of fascists; a federal constitution that guarantees regional autonomy; economic support that doesn't pauperise the majority; and a chance for people in Crimea to choose their own future. Anything else risks spreading the conflict.
Flat Earth Politics (30 December 2013)
Here's another offering from the Guardian's comment editor, Seumas Milne, who continues his very one-sided writings which condemn America, Britain and other western countries at every opportunity - yet have nothing to say about the vile regimes which previously controlled Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
I discovered only recently that privately educated Seumas was the former editor of the Straight Left magazine - the voice of a ridiculously pro-Soviet sect within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) during the 1980s.
So I wonder what Straight Left and/or Seumas had to say about the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1982 because I, for one, would find that very interesting - as background to his relentless criticism of the west.
In any event, I hardly agree with a word of what Seumas has to say - his reference to the 'justification' used by the killers of Drummer Lee Rigby seem ridiculous to me and no more justified than the reasons given by Anders Breivik for committing mass murder in Norway.
Does Seumas, for example, agree with Michael Adebolajo that Allah chose the off-duty, unarmed soldier - and compelled them to run his victim down with a car before attempting to cut off his head?
I think not, but why let a casual throwaway reference - get in the way of a good story.
As for the rest of his article, Seumas ignores the fact that al-Qaeda launched its murderous terrorist attack on 9/11 from a safe haven in Afghanistan where the Taliban allowed the group to operate freely, so simply sitting back and doing nothing was never an option from an invasion that was supported by the United Nations.
In Libya, the former Gaddafi regime (a former ally of the Soviet Union of course) was about to commit mass murder against the country's internal opposition before western countries intervened - yet again the state of the country is down the the 'west' rather than the need for totalitarian, often tribal and religious, states to embrace democratic reforms based on sharing political power and respecting minority rights.
As far as I can see, according to the word Seumas inhabits the 'west' is responsible for all of the problems of the world and never does right for doing wrong - presumably even in the former Yugoslavia (a former Soviet satellite state) - where ethnic cleansing and mass murder was prevented only by the threat and use of military action by NATO.
The new and peaceful countries which have emerged from the former Yugoslavia - Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia and Croatia - would no doubt beg to disagree with Seumas and his one-dimensional analysis about the pros and cons of intervention against tyrannical regimes.
Many years ago I used to think of the followers of Straight Left as supporters of a one dimensional, 'flat earth' politics - and all this time later I've heard nothing to change my mind.
