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    FT: Putin is launching an assault on the last vestiges of Soviet identity Archived Message

    Posted by Ken Waldron on January 24, 2023, 7:35 am

    I disagree with this piece on many levels : most especially that of proposed "perceived ownership" but post it here for interest. The btl comments are especially illuminating giving great insight into the half baked prejudices and utterly partial historical notions of Financial Times readers who might provide a handy proxy sample of what our elite "think". They really don't make a pretty read: collectively a frightening mindset.

    My views potted are doubtless broadly similar to many others here: that Putin was not prepared to accept NATO in Sebastopol which would be a suicidal move for any Russian government in giving a self evidently hostile military alliance unfettered access to the Black sea and the Russian interior. Which is clearly why (with the support of its citizens) it annexed long-Russian Crimea after the US destabilised the Ukraine in the coup.

    That he refused to recognise the breakaway republics and had no problem with accepting Ukraine (minus Crimea) geographically as long as the rights of its millions of Russian speakers were respected rather than shelled and on the proviso that it remained neutral and did not harbour a NATO force hostile to Russia.
    On the other side, having organised the Maidan coup, the western powers built up a NATO-Ukraine proxy army: deliberately incorporated self-proclaimed Russian hating Nazis into the security apparatus and the military: now the largest in Europe aside from Russia's own and having acted in utter bad faith at Minsk to build that military as Merkel etc now admits, sabotaging the attempts to resolve the issue of the breakaway republics peacefully, they likewise took to destroying the peace talks after the Russian operation took place, and increasingly championed, supplied and funded a war against Russia to the tune of billions.

    On personalities and prejudices it seems to me self evident that the present attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure have little to do with a Russian superiority complex, a sense of ownership and chauvinism but are quite simply a practical acceptance that maintaining the status of a "Special operation" in which Ukrainian infrastructure was left intact was now the equivalent of holding a butter knife in a gunfight.
    Ukraine in fact got full recognition for what it now was: a vassal state absolutely allied to the enemies of Russia. At that point it could no longer be conferred the civility of a merely errant neighbour. Ukraine at the highest levels of its utterly corrupt government chose to be an enemy of Russia and to use its own people as cannon fodder in an unwinnable war that will now leave hundreds of thousands dead, millions exiled and a patchwork mess of demolished fragments on the ground. If it doesn't all end with the big boom that some insane sectors of NATO and the west are actually mooting as "a good idea" they will eventually say "Oh well... it was worth a try..." throw whatever little blood and soil remnant that remains some rebuilding money like a bone to a dog you have abused and is on its last legs ...and then move on elsewhere.

    "So what's next folks? How's that Taiwan place doing?"


    Putin is launching an assault on the last vestiges of Soviet identity

    The attack on Ukraine has revealed faultlines in many Russians’ attitudes towards the former USSR

    ALEXANDER BAUNOV JANUARY 22 2023



    The writer, a former Russian diplomat, is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the European University Institute

    While the dead and injured were being pulled from the ruins of a residential building in the city of Dnipro following a hit by a Russian missile, supporters of Vladimir Putin’s invasion in Russia claimed the deadly attack happened because the weapon had been intercepted by Ukrainian air defences.

    Just a few months earlier, many of the same people were saying that the Russian military did not attack civilian infrastructure. But the boundaries of what is permissible in their own minds have since expanded rapidly, and with them the course of the war in Ukraine.

    The incident in Dnipro took place on January 14, a day that, paradoxically, unites Russians, Ukrainians and other peoples of the former Soviet Union: the so-called “old new year”, celebration of which began in 1918 after Bolshevik Russia moved from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

    Anyone who grew up in the USSR will have participated in “new year tree” performances, which took place from the end of December until old new year. In these, children would come together to take part in a ritual in which the forces of evil trying to extinguish the lights on the tree are defeated.

    Now, it’s as if Russia wants to turn out the lights in Ukraine. From the start, their army fought brutally, but eventually it began to target Soviet-era heating systems and power plants. Russian propaganda expresses delight at the idea of Ukrainians being left without electricity, water and heating through the winter because the Russian army is bombing their power plants.

    Today, as Putin seeks to restore Russian greatness, ideas that had survived from the Soviet era are being abandoned. These include the notion of the friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, each of whom used to inhabit their own titular Soviet republic (this is one of the reasons Putin now criticises the Soviet project).

    The region of Zaporizhzhia, which in the USSR was considered Ukrainian, is now, after an illegal referendum last autumn, declared to be just another Russian “oblast” — part of a triune greater Russia comprising Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians.

    It is hard to discern a consensus among those who share this view about where the borders of this common land lie. Of course, the Russian language plays a role. Another factor is the victories in the “Great Patriotic War”, as the second world war is known, on the grounds that territory liberated from German Nazis cannot become hostile to Russia.

    There is also a third factor: the legacy of Soviet industrialisation — dams, power plants, metro systems, railways, factories and so on. When Russian forces destroy Soviet-era infrastructure in Ukraine they convey the following message: you wanted to live without us, then do so without the benefit of everything that we, the Russians, built for you. It is for the same reason, incidentally, that Kazakhstan, one of the centres of industrialisation in the USSR, also feels increasingly vulnerable today.

    There is a parallel between this attitude towards Ukraine and the way that Putin views Russian business. For the Kremlin, and arguably for many ordinary Russians, everything that was built by the Soviet state, and subsequently privatised, modernised and made fit for the market economy after the collapse of the USSR, is in fact “ours”. In other words, it belongs to the state in whose name Putin and his acolytes claim to speak.

    Today, the industrial fabric of what once were Soviet republics is increasingly seen as a Russian gift to the less developed outposts of the USSR. This marks a further break with Soviet identity, which was based on the assumption that factories, bridges and roads throughout the territory were the result of the collective efforts of all the peoples of the Union.

    Many Russians approve of the bombardment of Ukraine’s infrastructure because they consider the latter to be a gift to ungrateful Ukrainians, which is not being used for Russia’s benefit.

    The Kremlin and ordinary citizens of Russia tend to look at Ukraine and other former Soviet republics and forget that economic development would have happened there anyway — with or without them. After all, it is impossible to imagine a European country such as Ukraine, with a population of several tens of millions, without power plants, schools or factories.

    What we are witnessing is the final transition from the Soviet “we” to a new “us and them”. Putin’s war on Ukraine is not only strengthening the emerging national identity of Ukrainians; it is also decisively changing the post-Soviet identity of many Russians.


    https://www.ft.com/content/c24ebf22-9d81-4b2f-bb1b-0f880afdfcde

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