Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, declared on March 4 that Ukraine is Russia, indicating the Kremlin intends to incorporate all of what is called Ukraine and turn its people into obedient citizens.
These historic parts of Russia need to “come home,” he said. The Kremlin argues that this is not expansion by conquest, but simply taking back what belongs to Russia — an inseparable part of its “historic and strategic territory.” Russia will fight on until the Kyiv government capitulates.
Two days later, an article in Moskovskii Komsomol’ets asserted that Russia’s war (which some still refer to by the Kremlin’s favored euphemism, the special military operation, or SMO) will not stop with taking both sides of the Dnieper. Why? Because the real Russia includes the Black Sea region together with Transnistria.
Columnist Dmitry Popov warned that if countries bordering Ukraine do not respect Russia’s interests, the SMO will keep moving westward. He argued that Russia extends from Zhytomyr (near Belarus) to Lviv (near Poland) to Vinnytsia (adjacent to Moldova and Romania) to Chernivtsi (close to Romania), and to Uzhgorod (at the border with Slovakia and near to Hungary).
For “them” — the peoples of Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Romania, Slovakia, and Hungary — “the offer is there, but they must respect our interests and we will halt.” Popov’s language is ambiguous, but he seems to imply that Russia’s renewed imperial expansion will continue into all lands bordering Ukraine unless they accept Russia’s absorption of Ukraine,
On March 11, an article in the same newspaper by a sinologist, Yury Tavrovskii, said Russia should reform its political structure based on the Chinese model. Russia, he wrote, needs to create a “Party of Victory.”
Tavrovskii claimed the war has fundamentally changed Russia’s economic and social life and the recent election demonstrated that nearly all Russian citizens support Putin whatever he does. They admire his cool temper when things get tough, he said, adding that Russians believe their country’s stature in the world has risen. (Most foreign governments, observers, and exiled Russian journalists agreed that Putin probably “won” an election but also that he rigged it to exclude opponents and allow extensive ballot manipulation.)
The China expert said Russians now expect the transformation of their country. They don’t want changes like those in the 1990s, which imported Western technology and electoral competition, fragmenting society and bolstering centrifugal tendencies.
Instead, Russia needs a modern national political organization — a Party of Victory that reflects national traditions as well as today’s societal mobilization.
Russia today should modernize Lenin’s ideas, as China has done, Tavrovskii said. “Xi Jinping Thought” helps people navigate current conditions with a strategic perspective toward the nation. Adapting Xi’s ideas could bring new energy to Russia’s political life, he said.
Tavrovskii’s ebullient message appeared just days before terrorists killed or wounded almost 300 concert-goers in Moscow. Such mass tragedies can operate like two-edged swords, as Alexander Motyl cautioned in The National Interest on March 25. They can serve as pretexts for repression and war, but can also expose government indifference to human suffering and spark unrest.
Putin’s campaigns are pushing Russia toward top-down rule like that described by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We in 1921 and later in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — a system not just emulated but surpassed by the Xi Jinping model.
Gone are dreams that one could ever think and speak as one chooses, the editors of the exiled media outlet Novaya Gazeta warned on March 11. Putin traditionalists condemn the “licentious egotism” that rejects patriotism, marriage, large families, and Russia’s contributions to world history and culture.
Adopting the Chinese model could strengthen ties between the world’s largest country by geography and another with the world’s second-largest population and GDP. If Russia tightened its controls over thought and expression, most visibly in Hong Kong, the Sino-Russian axis could produce a “brave new world” across Eurasia.
These trends endanger not just the peoples of Russia and China, but the entire world.
Russian oppositionist Leonid Gozman summed up the Kremlin’s outlook as “Let There Be War.” The Kremlin, according to Gozman in Novaya Gazeta on March 14, believes it can expand by a series of small wars — but nothing so dire as to provoke a strong response from the West.
Putin believes “a weak and weak-willed West will capitulate, giving up on its allies and making concessions, and by the time it realizes it’s conceded everything there is to concede, it will be too late,” he wrote.
Most Europeans and Americans were “sleeping” in the 1930s. How about the 2020s?
Walter Clemens is an Associate at the Harvard Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston University. He wrote ‘Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims’ (Westphalia, 2023).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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