Johnson's Russia List
#9006
5 January 2005
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A CDI Project
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#14
Eye on Eurasia: Dropping big brother
By Paul Goble
TARTU, Estonia, Jan. 4 (UPI) -- Recent statements by Ukrainians and even
by ethnic Russians living in Ukraine cast doubt on suggestions by senior
Russian Federation officials that ever more non-Russians in the post-Soviet
states are again looking to the Russians as their "elder brother" as Moscow
commentators routinely claimed in the past.
Instead, these comments from Ukraine suggest that Russian actions there
have so alienated the citizens of non-Russian countries that Moscow will
not be able to draw on the kind of residual loyalty it had felt it had in
the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and may be driven either
to cede its interests in other former Soviet republics or employ other
means to advance them.
The statements of Ukrainians and ethnic Russians living in Ukraine were
posted on a Russian nationalist website last week and do not even purport
to be a representative sample. (
http://www.apn.ru/?chapter_name=print_advert&data_id=321&do=view_single)
But their observations are not inconsistent with other reporting and thus
merit close attention.
One Ukrainian said that earlier Russia had been for him a "brother,"
even if not "an elder one." But because of Moscow's intervention in the
Ukrainian elections, he said he wanted to say that he no longer liked
Russia or Russians, something for which the Russians had only themselves to
blame.
Another Ukrainian said that "the revolution in Ukraine had revealed the
real attitude of Russians to Ukrainians" and that as a result, most of his
"Russian friends had passed into the camp of enemies." Russians, he added,
do not want to understand that "before God, all are equal" and that "sooner
or later all empires, however great, collapse."
A third said that she had always written "Russian" on the nationality
line of various forms, but now "when remembering that, [she] felt a sense
of shame." And she added that while she had never had any illusions about
the attitudes of the Russian state toward non-Russians, she had been
shocked in recent weeks by the "aggressive" attitudes of ordinary Russians
toward Ukrainians.
Yet a fourth said that relations between Ukraine and Russia "will never
be the same." Rather, he suggested, Ukrainians in the future will look on
Russians in the same way Russians have looked on Ukrainians. That marks a
big change. Earlier, he said, he had wished Russia and its people well
because he felt "they were ours." Now, he said, they are "simply ,they.'"
A fifth added that there was a clear analogy in this case with
situations in some families. A brother who insults and belittles you is
still a brother, and you love him. But if at some point, he takes out a
knife and kills your favorite cat, "he remains [your] brother. [But only]
technically."
Other observers of the Ukrainian scene have reported similar comments,
and at least one has pointedly noted that even "the majority of Russians in
Ukraine have long ago become Russian-speaking Ukrainians." As a result, the
differences between them and Russian-speaking Ukrainians is not terribly
important. (http://www.rustrana.ru/print.php?nid=4985)
These comments are especially interesting because they contradict
arguments even now being made in Moscow by Russian analysts and officials.
In the current issue of "VVP," an analytic monthly close to the Russian
government and the Orthodox Church, one writer suggests that ever more
non-Russians are again coming to view Russia as "an elder brother," albeit
one less dominant than in Soviet times. (http://2vp.ru/print.php?id=287)
That author, Sergei Il'in, adds that this shift reflects both growing
economic integration in the post-Soviet region and the need to cooperate in
the struggle with international terrorism. That counter-terrorism plays
that role was stressed by several senior Russian Interior Ministry
officials last month. (http://mvdinform.ru/index.php?newsid=4820)
The comments of Ukrainian citizens cited above, however, suggest that
any broader cooperation, any return to a time in which non-Russians will
look up to the Russians as their specially beloved "elder brother" is
probably not in the cards -- if indeed most non-Russians ever really felt
the way that Russians and the Soviet government typically claimed.
Political changes in Georgia and Ukraine have transformed the political
landscape not only in the non-Russian countries but in the Russian
Federation as well -- even if many Russians and especially Russian
officials are not yet prepared to acknowledge the extent of that tectonic
shift.
But both officials and ordinary Russians are likely to have at least one
additional reason in the next few months to recognize that their status in
the post-Soviet states has changed and that the post-Soviet states are in
fact foreign countries.
On Dec. 30, the Russian Foreign Ministry reminded the citizens of the
Russian Federation that in the near future, they will need foreign
passports to travel to all Commonwealth of Independent States countries,
something they have not always needed in the first 13 years since the
collapse of the Soviet Union. (Interfax news agency as cited at
http://www.strana.ru/print/237130.html)
(Paul Goble teaches at the Euro-college of the University of Tartu in Estonia.)
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