A fortnight ago, on the opening day of the Winter Olympics, Moscow police arrested several LGBT activists for waving rainbow flags while they sang the Russian national anthem in Red Square. A day later further arrests were made at Manezhnaya Square after a group unfurled umbrellas to show support for the independent television station Dozhd. President Putin’s distaste for “gay propaganda” is well known, but Dozhd – which currently faces closure after extensive government pressure – probably provoked the Kremlin even more than the LGBT activists after it decided to poll viewers on the hypothetical question: “Would it have been better to surrender Leningrad to the Nazis during World War II in order to save hundreds of thousands of lives?”
Aside from its patently “unpatriotic” tenor, the Dozhd question seems embarrassingly relevant to the current crisis in the Ukraine where images of protesters battling police are strikingly similar to those which emerged from Tahrir Square before President Mubarak was forced to resign. Far from being a provocative counterfactual speculation, however, the violence in Kiev has ruined the carefully scripted Olympic narrative Vladimir Putin had prepared for February and it has exposed the political vulnerability of President Yanukovych in the most embarrassing way. Having lost two key allies in his prime minister and the mayor of Kiev, Yanukovych was further shamed two days ago when more than 30 members of the governing party supported a motion to condemn the violence in parliament.
The crisis in the Ukraine is largely due to President Putin’s stubborn refusal to allow a country that Russia has traditionally treated as a fiefdom from fostering better economic links to the European Union. On this occasion, however, Moscow’s hardline response has proved an embarrassing miscalculation. Since the suspension of the EU deal which triggered the initial protests last November, political resistance within the Ukraine has widened considerably. Protests now include extremist groups that are ultranationalist and openly anti-Semitic, and the violence has moved beyond the hurling of paving stones to include firearm attacks on policemen, the launching of home-made explosive devices and raids on government buildings.
In a withering denunciation of Putin’s Stalinist tendencies the Pussy Riot activist Maria Alyokhina notes that Dozhd television station was targeted for “posing a question about a siege during a siege” – not the current scene-stealing siege in Kiev, but the other one taking place within the costly Olympic village at Sochi, among the “giant, meaningless, alien objects whose purpose is to feed the ego of the country’s president, elevating him to the rank of a pharaoh or emperor.” Recalling the avant garde poet Nikolai Zabolotsky’s description of Russian life as a series of gulag prisons, Alyokhina observes that “the realities of the Stalin era made the voicing of a direct metaphor like this necessary, even at the cost of losing one’s freedom.” She adds “The reality of contemporary Russia, and Mr Putin’s goal, is to kill such metaphors — by force, if necessary — and to kill the reflection, analysis and criticism they carry … For as soon as obliviousness ends, so does Mr Putin’s power.”
Whatever happens in Sochi, Alyokhina’s warning may prove prescient in Kiev. As the British journalist James Meek recently observed, the riots in Kiev have made Ukrainians far more determined to decide their own future. He writes: “Europe is a metonym for a conceptual escape from what passes for governance in Ukraine – crooks, backhanders and family ties, like a Sicilian village in the 1940s – to something fairer, more just, more honest. It may be a fantasy, a paradisal vision. But there are times when visions take charge.” And it is clear that Yanukovych and, by extension, Putin have run afoul of this vision for too long. Whoever assumes control after the current crisis has been settled will need to address the crisis’ underlying political grievances with a proper respect for this vision, however naïve, and to do so with a great deal of political tact.
Former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi has written that Moscow sees Europe’s diplomacy as “empire-building in all but name,” while the EU sees “a jealous Russia determined to recreate an imperial past.” It remains to be seen whether the deal signed by the Ukrainian government and opposition on Friday involving an early presidential poll and a national unity government will result in a stabilizing of the situation and a softening of either of those positions. The EU’s inability to assuage Russia’s fears undoubtedly contributed to the impasse, but the lion’s share of the blame, and most of the cynical intransigence which has led to the recent bloodshed belongs to Russia and its unyielding, unimaginative president, Vladimir Putin.
