Paul Goble
Staunton, July 23 – Vladimir Putin has successfully counted on the war he launched in Ukraine to distract the attention of Russians from their problems at home, but if Russians are to emerge from the current crisis and save their own country, they will have to “forget about Ukraine” and focus on Russia instead, according to Vladislav Inozemtsev.
Russian rulers have often used “good little wars” to distract attention from domestic problems, although over the longer term, these conflicts have not always worked to the benefit of these rulers. Instead, when Russians have recognized what is going on, they have often turned to radical, even revolutionary means to change the situation.
In a commentary on Snob.ru yesterday, the economist points out that while the Kremlin talks about raising Russia from its knees, its own “warriors on the ideological front” have done everything possible to transform their own country into a backward information province” (snob.ru/selected/entry/95553).
They have done so by focusing on other countries and especially Ukraine and not talking about what is going on and going wrong in Russia. Last week, he notes, the top three stories – the anniversary of the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner, the conflict in Mukachevo, and the situation in Odessa – were about Ukraine.
Only the fourth most discussed story – the collapse of a military barracks in Omsk which killed 24 young Russian soldiers – was about Russia; and even it had a foreign dimension because the way in which Moscow has chosen to spend money on the military is distorted by its campaigns in Ukraine.
According to Inozemtsev, a cursory examination of the major news outlets, government and “even liberal,” shows that “in the majority of them, news from Ukraine takes up no less than a third”, and on certain days even more than half, of the news space.” That creates some unexpected and unwelcome realities.
As a result, Russians “are better informed about how the Verkhovna Rada voted on ‘federalization’ of the eastern part of Ukraine than about how [Russia’s] regions east of the Urals live.” They “know more Ukrainian political leaders than they do Russian ones;” and they “hear a great deal more often about Ukrainian ‘banderites’ than about neo-Nazis in [their] own country.”
But as many have observed, “’Ukraine is not Russia,” he continues. And “by shifting the focus of attention from our own country, we give birth in ourselves to ever greater neglect to our own daily life,” forgetting about dead soldiers and a collapsing economy, ignoring corruption and avoiding discussions of problems in education and health care.
Two years ago, Ukraine filled no more than a few percent of news stories in the Russian media; and that was a more appropriate level, Inozemtsev suggests. He cites with approval Eli Wiesel’s observation that “the opposite of love is not hatred but indifference” and argues that Russia should show rather more of that to Ukraine in the future.
“If Russia were ‘to forget’ about Ukraine,” he argues, “this would be the best political move it could take now.” First, he says, Russians are tired of news that doesn’t affect their daily lives. Second, “the disappearance of Ukraine from Russia’s information space could become a serious hit also for Ukraine” because it would lead to less Western coverage of Ukraine.
Third, it would bring benefits because it would keep Russians from feverishly responding to developments in a place which “interests us approximately in the same amount as Paraguay or Laos.” And fourth – and this is the most important thing, Inozemtsev says – it would allow Russians to focus on what they should do to improve the situation at home.
“Therefore, I am convinced,” he writes, that those in Russia who want good things both for Russia itself and its neighbors ought to as quickly as possible ‘change the record’ and do everything possible in order to drop from the agenda foreign policy discussions.””
Inozemtsev continues: “Unfortunately, the Russian political and intellectual elite is fanatically devoted to concentrating on themes which cannot play a decisive role in the social and economic development of their own country.” In support of that argument, he points to something many would find surprising.
Vladimir Putin has stressed the importance of gas exports throughout his reign. He has devoted 14 of the 16 meetings he has had with foreign leaders in the last year to precisely that topic. But Gazprom provides only one out of every 200 Russians with a job, and it brings in only 12 percent of the country’s export earnings. Important but not as decisive as presented.
Ukraine is a similar kind of issue, Inozemtsev suggests. Whatever its future course will be, he says, Ukraine “will not define the historic path of Russia.” Those who assert the contrary “denigrate the size of their own country and forget about its problems. And if the Russian nation does not want to be transformed into a community of psychopaths ‘obsessed’ with minutiae, it would to immediately think about a new agenda.”