In the early 1970s, when I was graduating from a Moscow high
school, the Soviet Union had universal conscription and boys were expected to
do two years of compulsory military service. In our last grade we had military
instruction, a weekly class in which a superannuated army captain taught us to
take apart a Kalashnikov and offered us insights into geopolitics.
“Americans and we are like squabbling neighbors,” he told us.
“We keep peeking over each other’s fence to see what the other side is up to.”
However, when I got to the United States a year later I found
that not to be the case. By and large, ordinary Americans couldn’t care less
what the Soviets were up to. Even though the Cold War was still in full swing,
and in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate Washington seemed to be losing
it, the USSR wasn’t much on the American radar screen. Politicians would still
mention it, but most Americans knew almost nothing about life in the Soviet
Union – and wanted to know even less.
Having come from a place where the government constantly
threatened to bury capitalism, we were convinced that Americans were making a
grave mistake. Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the loudest voice fulminating
against what he saw as Washington’s fatal insouciance at the face of mortal
danger, but all of us former Soviet citizens kept warning those naive Americans
to be vigilant. But they resolutely refused to listen to us and to pay
attention to Moscow’s machinations.
In this case it was exactly what the doctor ordered. The United
States had a strong nuclear deterrent which made a military attack from the
Soviet Union impossible. Other than that, they strongly believed that democracy
was more attractive than tyranny (or, as Dmitry Medvedev once said, “freedom is
better than non-freedom”) and that their capitalist economic system is more
efficient than the Soviet command economy.
Americans cultivated their own garden, building a highly
innovative, formidably competitive economy and effecting a revolution in
information technologies. They laid the foundations for a world in which the
Soviet Union simply couldn’t exist. Accordingly, it went on rotting until it
finally collapsed. The Warsaw Pact disintegrated without a single shot and
Soviet tank divisions, which Solzhenitsyn feared were poised to get to the
English Channel, ignominiously headed home.
Russia annexed Ukrainian territory and invaded Eastern Ukraine,
but those conflicts are frozen. Kyiv can’t restore its territorial integrity by
military means while Putin’s economy is in too dire a shape to contemplate
escalation. Instead, the was between the two countries now resembles the Cold
War.
It has also shifted onto the worldwide web. Russia actually
pays money to some of its citizens to squabble on social media, but there are
plenty of Russians eager to engage in Internet polemics for free. You can, for
example, open pretty much any Soviet-era clip on YouTube and read the comments
to see what it looks like. You’ll find a surfeit of Soviet nostalgia and vows
to get it all back weapons in hand. And, of course, talk about the glorious
past naturally leads to imprecations against traitorous Ukrainians.
Sad to say, Ukrainians give back as good as they get. Strings
of abusive comments run into hundreds and stretch over periods of months, with
new participants on both sides joining the fray to contribute their two cents’
worth of hatred.
It’s true that social media encourages this kind of pointless
nonsense. Some of the debaters are schoolkids, and others are unemployed or
underemployed adults. There are plenty of those since the two countries’
economies are currently on the ropes. In general, with computers and robots
eliminating jobs and entire professions, there will be more and more people
with time on their hands to surf the Internet anger and frustration in their
hearts to heap abuse on their ideological foes.
Still, it is not a healthy sign for Ukrainians that over the
past two years, the Russian language segment of the Internet has become a
battlefield between “moskals” and “ukry”. It is comparable to similarly idiotic
virtual battles that have been waged by Indians and Pakistanis or by Israelis
and Palestinians in the English language segment.
What unites the conflicts on the Indian subcontinent and in the
MIddle East is that they have gone on for seven decades with no resolution in
sight. Countless thousands have died and have been displaced, huge economic and
human toll has been imposed on all sides, and very little has actually changed
on the ground. It’s not what Ukraine should strive for.
Russia is in a profound political, economic and moral crisis.
Its social and political institutions have been corrupted. The Putin regime in
its current form is near its end and there is a palpable sense of the end of an
era. Russia has no national goals. Subconsciously or not, the country’s
citizens dread the future. It is not surprising that the country should be
gripped by nostalgia for the past, listening to Soviet-era songs, watching
Soviet movies and pining away for Stalin, the Great Patriotic War and the late
lamented Soviet Empire.
Not so Ukrainians. They have a well-defined goal – to become
part of the West not only in declarations by its leaders but in real life. They
have their work cut out for them: to reform their post-Soviet economy and political
system, defeat corruption and strengthen their institutions.
In Russia even now, while the domestic economy goes down the
drain at an accelerating pace, the media remains obsessed by what happens in
Ukraine. The Kremlin is obsessed by Ukraine too, and its recent actions have
helped Ukraine break its dependence on Russian energy and severe commercial,
cultural and business ties. While bolstering their military deterrent by
building a modern army and hosting as many NATO military personnel as possible on
their territory, Ukrainians should at the same time close their minds to Russia
and turn decisively to the West.
Just as Americans did in the 1980s, Ukrainians may discover
that if they ignore their Russian problem, it
may simply go away.
