[R-G] "Ultra-nationalists Join the Russian Mainstream" (FT) vs "Russia's Return as a 'Post-ideological' Power" (Daily Star)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

The contrast between the Financial Times' and the (Lebanese) Daily
Star's interpretations is striking.  Arabs (even Westernizers among
them) are more level-headed than Westerners about Russia.  -- Yoshie

<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4e3712f4-7dc6-11dd-bdbd-000077b07658.html>
Invasion's ideologues: Ultra-nationalists join the Russian mainstream
By Charles Clover in Moscow
Published: September 8 2008 20:09 | Last updated: September 8 2008 20:09

A decade ago, many of the most influential thinkers in today's Russia
were in the intellectual wilderness. While some sat in
pamphlet-littered basements churning out copies of underground
ultra-rightwing newspapers with names such as Lightning and Russian
Order, others were in jail following failed coups in 1991 and 1993
against the pro-western "occupation regimes" of Mikhail Gorbachev and
Boris Yeltsin.

Russia's intellectual journey since then has been dizzying, as the
radical has become mainstream and the hardline position increasingly
moderate-sounding, with what were the margins emerging as the
political centre.

Now, against the backdrop of conflict in Georgia and deteriorating
relations with the west, Russia's ultra-nationalist thinkers are
starting to exert unprecedented influence. The wide acceptance of a
group of ideas once dismissed as laughable signals a new era in
Russia's foreign relations, as Moscow seeks to protect what President
Dmitry Medvedev calls a "region of privileged interest" in parts of
the former Soviet Union.

Rising nationalist opinion could also mean bigger defence budgets and
a race to modernise Russia's military as well a presaging a yet more
nationalist approach to economic policy. The government is coming
under increasing pressure to invest the country's oil wealth at home
rather than abroad and could even respond to international criticism
of the war in Georgia by pre-emptively imposing trade restrictions on
the US.

The war not only boosted the prestige of the military, which enjoyed
its first successful campaign in a generation. It has also enhanced
the reputations of a narrow group of ultra-nationalist thinkers who
prophesied the coming clash with the west. Today's Russia, willing to
press its national objectives with military force, unconcerned with
the erosion of democracy and dismissive of world opinion, was foretold
a decade ago in inky manifestos and in lecture halls full of bearded
radicals straight out of Dostoevsky.

"I am convinced that now, following the war, there will be a huge
shift in the balance of power within the Russian elite," says
Aleksander Dugin, leader of the Eurasian Movement, a prominent
far-right group.

Mr Dugin has seen a remarkable improvement in his fortunes since the
days in the early 1990s when he worked out of a basement flat in a
gritty central Moscow district penning works on the metaphysics of
Christianity. He went on to become a television talk show host and a
professor at Moscow State University. Now he has a radio show on the
Kremlin-supported 107 FM.

"The people that formed the centre under [former president, now prime
minister Vladimir] Putin will now become marginal. And another pole
will appear that did not exist under Putin at all. That is the army,
the military and patriotic movements. That is us. Under Putin we were
the extremists: respectable, yes, but radicals. Now we are moving
right into the centre," he says.

Not everyone shares Mr Dugin's view, but the newly ascendant
nationalism is likely to bring new ideas into Russia's mainstream.
These form no less than the basis of a looming ideological clash
between Russia and the west. "Political momentum has been shifting in
[the ultra-nationalists'] direction for quite some time. One could
argue that the incursion into Georgia was something new, but it was
building on a momentum that we have been seeing," says John Dunlop
from Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Viktor Erofeev, a well-known author and one of a small and shrinking
minority of Russians who question the reasons for the war against
Georgia, attributes the wave of patriotism to a widespread "cult of
power". In a recent radio debate, Mr Erofeev described it as "the joy
of victory, in sport, in politics, but also in war. It is an archaic
form of self-consciousness ... [that] has remained with us, where it
has disappeared in more civilised countries."

Amid the bombast about reimposition of Tsarist rule, the
reconstitution of the Soviet Union or Russian empire and banishing
Washington's influence from the region, the new right does have a
philosophical bone to pick with the west, which proclaims the
"universality" of democracy and human rights and makes the US ready to
defend and promote these goals throughout the world – by military
force if necessary.

Russia's opposition to "unipolar domination" by Washington is tied to
the view pushed by the thinkers of the new right that such universal
truths are an illusion, that their nation and civilisation form a
unique "whole" that has a right to existence. That this ideological
approach has penetrated to the Kremlin can be seen in a now famous
speech in Munich in February 2007 by Mr Putin, in which the then
president said he considered the unipolar model "not only unacceptable
but also impossible in today's world". The model was flawed, he
argued, because "at its basis there is and can be no moral foundation
for modern civilisation". It was a speech that was labelled by some
commentators as the start of a new "cold war" with the west.

Russia's insistence on the right to "sovereign democracy", a phrase of
Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin's top ideologist, can also be traced to
this philosophical opposition to moral absolutes. Mr Surkov argues
that each nation has the right to practise democracy in its own
"sovereign" way, which rationalises in theoretical terms the fact that
Russian democracy is not very democratic at all.

Many ultra-nationalists already walk the corridors of power: Dmitry
Rogozin, former head of the Rodina (Motherland) party, is Russia's
ambassador to Nato. The Duma, or parliament, has also been a hive of
activity of radical nationalists since the mid-1990s, regularly
featuring the rantings of arch-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

While their liberal western-oriented counterparts spent the decade
following the collapse of communism learning the economic theories of
Milton Friedman or reading up on the Council of Europe, the venerable
organisation dedicated to promoting human rights, Russia's
nationalists were studying the Orthodox church, mugging up on French
postmodernism or simply "drinking beer, playing chess and lifting
dumbbells", as Valery Korovin, leader of the Eurasian Youth Movement,
puts it.

Russia's military and "special services" such as the former KGB, now
FSB, have long had a mysterious connection to these ultra-rightwing
groups. The rising stature of the siloviki, as the former uniformed
men are known, has accompanied a rise in the prestige of rightwing
philosophy. While serving officers tend to keep their political
leanings to themselves, several retired officers took on a high
profile in the media during the Georgian war and their prestige is
only likely to increase with the success of the military campaign.

Aleksander Prokhanov, editor of the radical rightwing Tomorrow
newspaper and known as the "nightingale of the general staff" for his
close links to Russia's top brass, predicts a political crisis between
pro-western and nationalist political factions. After the military
victory in the Caucasus, the nationalists will need to guard against
political setbacks at home, he says. That requires "very fast changes
– social, political, economic and ideological" in Russia, in which the
main opponent will be the new pro-western elite "who are loath to give
up their assets in the west".

The event that gave the new right much of its popularity was Russia's
agonising decade of economic collapse following the end of communism:
that destroyed the credibility of liberal democratic reformers. In
addition, the US campaign against Russia's ally Serbia in 1999 sparked
a sea- change in public opinion.

Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, opinion polls showed
nationalism was a phenomenon associated primarily with lower-income
groups, while the upper echelons of society saw imitation of the west
in all things, from democracy to liberal economics, as desirable. But
already in 2001, a study by the Center for Political Technologies in
Moscow noticed a new "ideology" among the middle and upper class –
previously the "agents of modernisation". A majority had come to see
Nato as a hostile force and the break-up of the Soviet Union as a
mistake. Most viewed Russia as belonging to a unique civilisation
separate from the west.

Under Mr Putin's eight-year presidency, the popularity of rightwing
ideas grew as he deployed belligerent rhetoric and used Kremlin
resources to sponsor groups such as Nashi, the youth movement
organised by Mr Surkov. Mr Putin, and Mr Medvedev after him, adorned
the presidency with the trappings of empire – regularly featuring the
orthodox cross of Tsarist Russia and the red star of Soviet might.

Today, Russia's ideological transformation is complete, if
contradictory. Just like in the 19th century, when Russia's armies
fought against Napoleon while its aristocracy spoke French, today's
Russian elite embraces a confusing agenda: Nato is considered a
hostile force and they support the war in Georgia, but they still
prefer holidaying in the west, owning property there and sending their
children to British private schools.

However, analysts caution that public support for Kremlin policies is
not unconditional. More than on patriotism and national pride, public
approval for Mr Putin is based on his – and now Mr Medvedev's –
presidency delivering higher living standards. Dmitri Simes of the
Washington based Nixon Center says there are limits to the sacrifices
people will make: "They don't want to be cut off from the west, they
don't want to be isolated or ostracised." Russians do not want to
increase military spending in a way that would compete with or
threaten other national priorities, he says.

"Mr Putin was so hugely popular not just because of his national
security credentials but because, under him, Russians began to live
much better. But a new cold war, a new arms race, would threaten all
that."

<http://media.ft.com/cms/5517e708-7dc9-11dd-bdbd-000077b07658.jpg>
Aleksander Dugin: Author of the influential 1997 book 'The Foundations
of Geopolitics', which he wrote in conjunction with a general from the
Academy of the General Staff. In it, he theorised that Russia, the
earth's largest land power, was the natural antagonist to the
"Atlantic world" of the US and Britain. He heads the Eurasian
Movement, devoted to that philosophy, and has helped translate
European "new right" authors into Russian. He has been a professor at
Moscow State University and now has a weekly radio show.

<http://media.ft.com/cms/5349cc98-7dc9-11dd-bdbd-000077b07658.jpg>
Dmitry Rogozin: Elected to Russia's lower house of parliament in 1997,
he co-headed the ultra-nationalist Rodina (Motherland) party from
2003. Rodina, a Kremlin-backed nationalist party, was designed to draw
votes away from the powerful Communist party, which has been in
constant opposition to the Kremlin. Mr Rogozin was removed as a leader
of the party in 2006 after losing an internal power struggle. In
January 2008 he was named Russia's ambassador to Nato.

<http://media.ft.com/cms/56baf05a-7dc9-11dd-bdbd-000077b07658.jpg>
Aleksander Prokhanov: One of the original nationalist writers to
emerge in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, he is now editor of Tomorrow
newspaper and a close friend of many of Russia's top generals. Those
include Field Marshal Dmitry Yazov, who planned the 1991 coup attempt
against Mikhail Gorbachev, which ultimately failed. He is a successful
fiction author and is often featured on television and radio
programmes representing rightwing views.

<http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&article_id=95777&categ_id=17>
The Middle East and Russia's return as a 'post-ideological' power
By The Daily Star

Monday, September 08, 2008

Editorial

Russia's bold stroke in the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia
last month has added a new dimension to the resurgence under way for
the past few years. The Kremlin has signaled that it is back as major
player on the world stage, a prospect that carries far-reaching
implications for many regions - the Middle East in particular.
Governments and peoples in this part of the world have much to gain
from a shakeup of the international order as it has existed since the
collapse of the former Soviet Union. To do so, however, they will have
to recognize that this new Russian challenge to American supremacy is
very different from the one that kept the Cold War going for decades.

For one, today's Russia might be described as "post-ideological." Its
tussles with the United States (and some other Western countries) are
no longer potentially existential ones that lead inevitably to
zero-sum games. In addition, despite its growing energy wealth, Moscow
no longer has the strategic wherewithal to engage in dozens of
far-flung contests with Washington. What it retains includes a
determination to protect its own interests (especially close to home)
and, increasingly, a willingness to be assertive in doing so. It also
has a relatively large population infused with considerable amounts of
ability and no shortage of national pride. In short, the days when
post-Soviet Russia could be ignored are definitively over.

It cannot have been a coincidence that the first foreign leader to
visit Russia after the humiliation of Georgia (and its American ally)
was another individual with a long history of defying US demands,
Syrian President Bashar Assad. This demonstrated that Russian
President Dmitry Medvedev and the real power behind his throne, Prime
Minister Vladimir Putin, will not shy away from taking their struggles
with Washington to venues in the Middle East. The Russians also have
grand plans to leverage their huge reserves of natural gas into even
greater riches by increasing cooperation with other key producers. In
addition, Moscow has sought to slow the flow of sanctions against Iran
over that country's nuclear program and is scheduled to complete a
reactor for the Islamic Republic in 2009.

A new Cold War is not unavoidable, and Russia does not need one to
effect the gains its seeks. The United States is badly over-extended
militarily, and its influence has been sharply diminished by years of
unilateralism. Apart from those in Georgia, recent developments in
Lebanon have also made it clear that expressions of American "support"
are no guarantee of victory over one's rivals. Situations like these
will offer Russia openings to spread its influence, and while most
Middle Eastern governments should have learned by now that serving as
proxies in a wider struggle can be a thankless business, each would do
well to re-examine the new realities. Needless to say, the same
applies to the next president of the United States.