Is Russia a Danger to the West?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

 

Ever since Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea, there has been a concerted campaign in western countries to depict Russia as an “evil empire” – to quote Ronald Regan’s phrase about the old Soviet Union.

Putin’s hand in supposedly destabilizing countries around the globe – including the United States – is now a common theme in western discourse.

How much of this is true? Russia is a major power that pursues its own national interests, the way every other state does. What else is new?

NATO, after all, took advantage of the Soviet Union’s collapse to move so far eastwards that it even incorporated the Baltic states, which had been integral parts of the USSR. And this expansion continues throughout eastern and southern Europe.

Just recently, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, acceding to Greek demands, changed its name to North Macedonia, thus making it possible to avoid a Greek veto in its quest to join NATO. 

The alliance is of course ready to welcome it with open arms. On June 3, NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, commended Prime Minister Zoran Zaev for making the reforms necessary to join the transatlantic military alliance next year.

It would become the 30th member of the U.S.-led group.

Three other ex-Yugoslav republics-- Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro -- have already joined NATO, as have other countries in the Balkan region including Albania, Bulgaria and Romania.

Putin contends that by taking in Balkan members, the alliance is undermining security in the region. But this is blithely ignored as Russian paranoia. After all, isn’t NATO a force for good?

In a recently published book, Cambridge University historian Mark B. Smith warns against the prevailing view of Russia as an aggressor.  

In The Russia Anxiety: And How History Can Resolve It, he goes so far as to describe this distorted view of the country is actually pathological. Smith sees the controversy in the United States over Russian election meddling as just another example of this.

“The Russia Anxiety is a syndrome with three sets of symptoms: fear, contempt and disregard.” The remedy for this illness, Smith tells us, is to examine Russia’s history, “a platform from which to look at Russia more calmly, reasonably and accurately.”

Martin Aust, an historian at the University of Bonn in Germany, also subscribes to this point of view.
In his new book The Shadow of the Empire ― Russia since 1991, he maintains that Russia is not an empire.

“That becomes clear looking at the difference between Russia since 1991 and older iterations --czarism and the Soviet Union,” he said in a recent interview with the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Speaking about Putin’s 2014 incorporation of Crimea, which until 1954 had belonged to Russia, not Ukraine, he noted that “Crimea has an emotional value for Russia” that many don’t understand.

Aust thinks Putin was taken aback at the sharp western reaction to Russia’s regaining control of the peninsula, with its ethnic Russian majority, following the coming to power of an anti-Russian regime in Ukraine.

Until 2014, Moscow’s strong desire had been to keep the link between Ukraine and Russia as close as possible. Now, though, Russia faces continued animosity from Kyiv – and Washington.