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Nobel Prize winning writer and former Soviet disident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died the other day at the venerable age of 89. To put Solzhenitsyn in perspective, over the course of his life he had survived Stalin’s Great Terror, combat in WWII, torture at the hands of the NKVD, slave labor, cancer, harrassment by the KGB and enforced exile to return in bittersweet triumph to his beloved Russia after the Soviet collapse.  His last years were spent in ill-health, moving closer to Russian nationalist circles and celebrating Russia as an Orthodox civilization spiritually apart from the liberal West.

An uncompromising and fearless moral voice against Soviet tyranny, Solzhenitsyn’s monumental work, The Gulag Archipelago, shook the Soviet Union’s ruling nomenklatura to the core. Along with the liberal physicist Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn was the dissident that Soviet leaders most feared given his ability not only to condemn the system’s crimes but to articulate an alternative, Russophilic, nationalist political program that millions of Soviet citizens might find attractive. Solzhenitsyn was among the first to postulate an independent Ukraine in his writings and thought that a territorial reduction to the Russian core of the Soviet Union would lead to a healthy regeneration of Russian culture and values that had been so badly damaged by Communism.

Solzhenitsyn was not and never claimed to be an admirer of Western liberal democracy, of whose chances as a historical victor over Communism he deeply and incorrectly doubted. If he had any forerunners in modern Russian history, Solzhenitsyn probably would have sympathized with the Tsarist Prime Minister and conservative reformer Petr Stolypin who had said before his assassination, that ” ….what we want is a Great Russia”. Solzhenitsyn dwelt on Russianess and wrote in the language in a way that eschewed foreign influences and saw other, even deeply entwined, ethnic groups in Russia from Jews to Ukranians and Belarussians as “others”.

A man wrong on many smaller things, on what he had right Solzhenitsyn was a titan.

A recent report from The Jamestown Foundation put a spotlight in the activities of Neo-Eurasian ideologist, the politically connected extremist Aleksandr Dugin, to build bridges with Turkey’s Pan-Turkic movement:

“….On the one hand, attempts are made to turn the two “Eurasias” into allies rather than competitors; on the other hand, there has been a Dugin-style ideologization of the term in response to American ascendancy. The question is whether the concurrence of these two modes of “Russification” of the Turkish Avrasya is incidental, or whether they are two sides of the same coin. In the 1990s, articles on the Turkish variety of Avrasya systematically criticized Russian Eurasianism; in the early 2000s, the tone changed noticeably. Several Turkish advocates of a more militant Eurasianism called upon their fellow citizen to emulate Russia in developing a specifically Turkish interpretation of this concept [6]. In 2002, at the conference “How to Establish a Peace Belt around Turkey” held by the Military Academies Command, the secretary general of the National Security Council, General Tuncer Kilinc singled out Russia as Turkey’s most strategic partner. In 2005, Turkish analyst Anar Somuncuoglu from the Russia-Ukraine Research Department at the National Security Strategies Research Center (TUSAM) published an article in Strateji Dergisi proving the need of rapprochement with Russia [7].

The term Avrasya has also become popular with religious circles that were not previously linked to the pan-Turkic extreme right. Thus the modernizing Islamists around Prime Minister Erdogan have been publishing the newspaper Avrasya kusagi since 2000, and partisans of a Turko-Islamic synthesis edit Yeni Avrasya [8]. Fethullah Gulen’s movement publishes DA Diyalog Avrasya in Russian and Turkish, which has already carried several interviews with Dugin [9]. Other proponents of this movement include the Ahmed Yasawi Foundation and the Marmara Group Foundation, directed by Akkan Suver, which regularly organizes “Eurasian economic summits.” In November 2006, this NGO was the first to be accorded an observer member status by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (PABSEC). There are also two social-democratic newspapers-Avrasya  Etnografya Vakfi and Avrasya Dergisi-as well as the above-mentioned Zaman [10].

Dugin participated in this reorientation in his own way, managing to have his book on geopolitics translated into Turkish (and Arabic). The translation was published in Ankara in 2003 as Rus Jeopolitigi Avrasyaci Yaklasim, and seems to have gone over well with part of the Turkish military.There have been several conferences on Eurasianism that called for cooperation with Russia, all of which included participants from the military. The first visit of the International Eurasianist Movement took place in December 2003. It received quite widespread media coverage in Turkey, due in particular to the presence of writer and journalist Atilla Ilhan (1925-2005). Over many decades, Ilhan consistently wrote on the subject of the Turkish-Russian alliance, even during the Cold War. Through his books, he popularized the idea of a Turkish-Russian alliance preordained by geopolitics and insisted on “Eurasianist” heroes such as Ismail Gasprinskii, Sultan Galiyev and Mulla Nur Vahidov [11]. This rapprochement between Dugin and Ilhan consequently helped Russian Eurasianism to reach some Turkish political and intellectual elite”

Read the whole thing here.

Of the obscure figures mentioned in the last paragraph, Gasprinskii was a Silver Age “jadid” ( Modernist) who sought an awakening of the Russian Empire’s Tatar-Turkic Muslim peoples; Vahidov and Sultan-Galiev, were Old Bolshevik Tatars who developed a Muslim variation of “national Bolshevism” that challenged Stalin’s ideas on Soviet nationalities ( Sultan-Galiev was ultimately shot during the Great Terror, unsurprisingly). These men represent historical failures whose intriguing ideas were suppressed by Tsarist and Stalinist authorities long before they could acquire political traction. Why is any of this important ?

In a nutshell, both Putin’s siloviki regime and Turkey’s Kemalist establishment are feeling the need for ideological rejuvenation  these days, in the former case to fill a vacuum in the public mind left by the collapse of Soviet Communism and in the latter to fend off a creeping Islamism that is undermining Turkish adherence to hallowed, secular, Kemalist traditions. The Neo-Eurasianism of Dugin is a frankly authoritarian, anti-western and quasi-fascist witch’s brew and synthesizing it with the Pan-Turkism of Turkey’s own nationalist fringe can only be unhelpful to Western interests and the prospects for liberalism and democracy in the region.

Vladimir Putin occupies so much political space in Russia than healthy, democratic, political competitors cannot take root. Like a great tree, Putin shades out lesser saplings. Unfortunately, poisonous weeds are creeping in the place of normal political fauna. The latest piece at HNN from Dr. Andreas Umland:

“The Great Danger If Russia Stays on the Path It’s On”

The roots of Russia’s currently rising nationalism are threefold: pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet. The idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome,” i.e. of a special Russian mission in world history, goes back several centuries. Russian nationalism had been – contrary to what many in the West believed – an important element of Soviet ideology ever since the 1930s. Like in the early 19th century when Moscow’s so-called Slavophiles applied German nativist thought to Russian conditions, ideas of various Russian nationalist movements today are often imported from the West.

….The main difference between Russian and Western forms of nationalism is that, in the contemporary West, the intellectual and political mainstream of a given country usually more or less clearly distances itself from that country’s – sometimes, also rather strong – nationalist movement. While the Russian mainstream is quick to condemn racist violence, its relationship to the world view standing behind such violence is, in contrast, more ambivalent. Thus, authors who, in the West, would be regarded as being far beyond the pale of permissible discourse, such as the ultra-nationalist publicist Aleksandr Prokhanov or ideologue of fascism Aleksandr Dugin, are esteemed participants in political and intellectual debates at prime-time TV shows. The bizarre, pseudo-scientific ideas of the late neo-racist theoretician Lev Gumilev are required reading in Russia’s middle and higher schools. Gumilev teaches that world history is defined by the rise and fall of ethnic groups that are biological units under the influence, moreover, of cosmic emissions.

Russia has always had a deep streak of xenophobic, romantic, mysticism as part of it’s character; a part that comes from it’s Pre-Petrine heritage but one that  has continued to resurface despite the best efforts of Westernizing modernizers or Soviet commissars to extinguish it. This latest resurgence is reminiscient of the wildest rhetoric from the racial lunacy of the 1920’s Volkish far Right in Weimar Germany in which the nascent Nazi Party incubated amidst Freikorps paramilitaries, Bavarian separatists and ultranationalist conspiracies.

In comparison, the siloviki do not look too bad.

“If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans” – Otto von Bismarck

“I think what we did in Kosovo was profoundly important.” – Bill Clinton

A new nation declared itself today after close to a decade as a UN protectorate; a fragment of a fragment of an extinguished artificial state once built upon the polyglot ruins of European empires and Muslim sultanates. This particular geographic node, Kosovo, has a quality that all of it’s larger forerunners lacked – the cultural unity of identity that will make the nation the primary loyalty of the overwhelming majority of it’s citizens. A fact on the ground that trumps diplomatic protests over the finer points of international law or the mythic appeal of seven hundred year old Lost Causes.

Kosovo’s declaration of independence is ultimately rooted in an overwhelming demographic reality that could have only been altered by Kosovar Serbians having had larger families three and four decades ago than their poorer Albanian neighbors; and the Yugoslavian and Serbian governments having given rural Serbs some kind of economic incentive not to migrate to Belgrade or the larger towns of Serbia proper. As such, Kosovo’s declaration is worrisome to all multiethnic states plagued by separatism where the majority population is in decline – from the windows of the Kremlin, Serbia today must look hauntingly like Russia writ small.

However demographics alone was probably not enough here to explain Kosovo – Kurds, Shan, Tamils, Basques, Tibetans, Palestinians, Uighurs, Baluchis, Pushtuns and in previous centuries, the Irish – all thoroughly dominate their respective homelands but are not yet being welcomed into independence by great powers. What hapened is that the adversaries of the Kosovar Albanian, the Serbians nationalists, also morally de-legitimized themselves under Slobodan Milosevic, with years of atrocities and ethnic cleansing in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Milosevic and his murderous policies had considerable popular support until the very end; they still retain support from a not inconsiderable, defiant, hardcore as evidenced by the inability or unwillingness of Serbia to bring Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to justice. As the Germans bade farewell forever to East Prussia and Silesia in 1945, Serbians today can reflect on Sarajevo’s impact upon their legal claim to sovereignty over Kosovo.

That being said, events can be handled well or poorly. Kosovar independence would have gone down better in a world where Russia was a prosperous, democratic state, thoroughly integrated into the Core and a regional strategic partner of the United States instead of a bitter, increasingly paranoid, plebiscitary “soft” dictatorship that views America with grave suspicion and the EU with contempt.  That was not an outcome that Washington could have created alone but a relationship that three administrations might have attempted to build with Russia but elected not to do so. Benign neglect mixed with pressure toward Moscow was a deliberate choice on our part, one that might have made Berlin, London and Paris happy in the 1990’s but it wasn’t to our long term strategic benefit.

Independence is good for the Kosovars and in the last analysis, inevitable; but our statesmen should be arranging matters so that the United States profits from inevitable events rather than simply bearing the diplomatic costs.

Kosovo Links:

Coming Anarchy  ,  Duck of Minerva,   TDAXP,  Aqoul,  Outside the Beltway,   Centerfield,   John Robb,  Matthew Yglesias   Catholicgauze – New!,     Weekly Standard -New!

UPDATE:

The United States government has formally recognized the independence of Kosovo via the State Department but, significantly, with an accompanying statement by President Bush.

TIME magazine, as most are no doubt aware, named Russian President Vladimir Putin as it’s 2007 “Man of the Year“.  The editors explained their choice in a way that also attempted to  articulate Putin’s stabilitarian “siloviki ideology”:

“But all this has a dark side. To achieve stability, Putin and his administration have dramatically curtailed freedoms. His government has shut down TV stations and newspapers, jailed businessmen whose wealth and influence challenged the Kremlin’s hold on power, defanged opposition political parties and arrested those who confront his rule. Yet this grand bargain-of freedom for security-appeals to his Russian subjects, who had grown cynical over earlier regimes’ promises of the magical fruits of Western-style democracy. Putin’s popularity ratings are routinely around 70%. “He is emerging as an elected emperor, whom many people compare to Peter the Great,” says Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center and a well-connected expert on contemporary Russia.

Putin’s global ambitions seem straightforward. He certainly wants a seat at the table on the big international issues. But more important, he wants free rein inside Russia, without foreign interference, to run the political system as he sees fit, to use whatever force he needs to quiet seething outlying republics, to exert influence over Russia’s former Soviet neighbors. What he’s given up is Yeltsin’s calculation that Russia’s future requires broad acceptance on the West’s terms. That means that on big global issues, says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former point man on Russia policy for the Clinton Administration, “sometimes Russia will  be helpful to Western interests, and sometimes it will be the spoiler.”

Putin’s rule can ( and typically has been) analyzed from the perspective of Sovietology and Russian history. Articles feature the usual, superficial, observations that Russians like a strong vozhd (supreme leader) in the tradition of Stalin, Alexander III, Nicholas I, Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible; that Putin’s regime is a Cheka-KGB front (  actually, KGB veterans are among the most competent and least ideological technocrats of the Soviet era officials – who would YOU hire ? The guys who ran Soviet agriculture ?); that Russians yearn for a return to the Cold War and so on.  While there is some truth to these statements regarding the Russian national character and unhappy history, to use them as a fundamental explanation of Russia’s current political system is mostly rubbish.  The truth is that Russia’s liberal and democratic parties self-destructed and discredited themselves among Russian voters in the waning years of Yeltsin’s tenure and that Putin enacted a moderately nationalist  and anti-oligarchical agenda that catered to the tastes of the vast majority of his countrymen. When Putin centralized power in his hands as a quasi-dictator, he did so in a political vacuum.

This pattern is hardly uniquely Russian. We have seen populist, plebiscitary yet police state regimes long before Vladimir Putin’s New Russia. Napoleon Bonaparte was the modern innovator, abolishing the decrepit Directorate and constructing a regime that offered a little something for everybody who wanted a glorious France; his cabinet included Jacobin Terrorists, Monarchists, Girondins, aristocracy, bourgeosie and the chameleon-like Talleyrand. Napleon made use of “new men” and flattered the old nobility even as he created a broad class of “notables” and answered the desire of the French for both greatness and order. Propaganda was used liberally but so to were the police-spies of Fouche to cadge Napoleon’s impressive plebescitary majorities out of the electorate. How different, functionally speaking, is Vladimir Putin? Or for that matter, Hugo Chavez ?

We  could go back still further to the Caesars – Julius and his canny heir Augustus. Both men understood well that truly revolutionary changes in a political system were most placidly accepted when cloaked in the guise of adhering to old forms and restoring order and normality ( it must be said though, that Octavian understood this better than his martial Uncle). After periods of disorder, want or uncertainty there has always been many people who are all too willing to trade liberty for economic security.

Whenever authoriarianism has the added attraction of marshalling competence and cultural values behind it’s standard, democrats should beware.

ADDENDUM:

Thomas P.M. Barnett – “Putin Positions himself as Russia’s Lee Kwan Yew”

The Guardian – “Putin, the Kremlin power struggle and the $ 40 bn fortune”

The Russia Blog – “Why Russia Loves Putin”

Michael Barone – “Putin: Odd Choice for Person of the Year“