Analysis: Ukraine crisis and elections show living legacy of Soviet Union

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Exactly 30 years after its dissolution, the Soviet Union is doing well, thank you.

The communist empire, an experiment unheard of in human history, implanted from the bloody rubble of the brutal Russian Civil War in 1922, was formally ended when the red hammer and sickle standard was lowered from the Kremlin at 7:32 pm on December 25, 1991.

The regime’s demise was a much longer process, crippled by the years of unbridled openness promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-91), its last leader. But its spirit remains firm and strong, at least as an element of geopolitical impact.

In the real world, just look at the crisis surrounding the troops sent by Vladimir Putin to press for a final deal in eastern Ukraine. In 1991, the second leading country in the Union was instrumental in its dismantling, seeking its independence and rejecting a reshaping of the Moscow-centered regime.

In 2005, the Russian president famously said that the breakup of the Soviet Union had been the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. The sentence is usually plucked out of context, essential to understanding part of the current impasse.

“For the Russian people, it became a real drama. Tens of millions of our citizens and countrymen found themselves outside Russian territory [com o rompimento da União]. The disintegration epidemic has also spread throughout Russia itself,” he then stated.

Two central points of the Putinist doctrine are placed there. First, the notion that the large percentage of ethnic Russians scattered across ex-Soviet republics are, in his view, part of the motherland.

This does not explain the core of the Ukrainian issue, which is the need to keep the territories lost to the end of the Union as part of its sphere of influence or neutral, but never as part of the Western military structure —namely, the Atlantic Treaty Organization North.

That premise guided the use of the two ethnic Russian territories in Georgia as justification for a war in 2008 that left the tiny country of the Caucasus out of NATO. In 2014, the recipe was repeated in pivotal Ukraine, whose government sympathetic to Putin had been overthrown, with the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the autonomy “manu militari” of the Donbass (eastern part of the country, pro-Russia).

The other extract of the phrase proved itself in the rise of Putin. Tricks or not, depending on the customer, he rose to the Kremlin as prime minister in 1999 and president at the turn of 2000 on the basis of a speech to prevent the physical disintegration of Russia — in this case, with the brutal second war against separatists in Chechnya.

Problem solved, the idea of ​​restoring buffer areas within the boundaries of what was the Russian Empire and, later, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, became an imperative.

Geography, says the buzzword, is destiny. Closed with precarious exits to the sea, the largest country in the world has always been vulnerable to invasions from Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. The most sensitive point, however, has always been the West.

Now, with talks scheduled for January about some sort of deal to avoid the use of force against Kiev, Putin is trying to establish what he already has in the Belarusian dictatorship: a separation between his troops and those of NATO.

In the Caucasus, he resolved the issue by keeping troops in key points in the region: the war in which his Armenian ally lost ground to rival Azerbaijan in 2020 was ended with the presence of Moscow peace forces. Even with Turkey with a keen eye on the region, in practice Putin holds the reins.

In Central Asia, which otherwise serves as a buffer against a China increasingly allied with Russia, instability in Kyrgyzstan was resolved, and the Russians became the key to the regional arrangement after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

All of this echoes 1991, when Washington’s great rival for four decades collapsed after a process of accelerated decay in previous years — the Cold War began to end in practice in 1987, with the now-deprecated agreement to veto nuclear-range missiles intermediary in Europe, and two years later the Berlin Wall would be in the ground.

Another Soviet aspect is the permanence of its frightening facet before conservative politicians and voters around the world.

Parties without shame to wear a star, hammer and sickle and the like continued on the rise throughout the world, always wearing social-democratic clothes. In places that have been oppressed like the Baltic States, it sounds like an outrage, but from Europe to Latin America they still sell themselves as libertarians.

Until, in 2016, the rise of the forces of Donald Trump and his partners around the world, from Jair Bolsonaro to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, brought back into fashion the discourse of the 1950s and 1960s about the risk of communism.

It is illusory and farcical, of course, given that few communist regimes actually remain: Cuba, North Korea, Laos, Vietnam and China. Of course, one might be tempted to cast Beijing as Moscow’s heiress, but the objective conditions are unparalleled.

The Chinese, to begin with, are second only to the world’s economy for their interconnectedness with international trade, something the Soviets never dreamed of having. Furthermore, the system there is mixed, with strong state capitalism and some liberalized pockets in finance, like the otherwise caged Hong Kong, to establish partnerships with the rest of the planet.

Ideologically, Xi Jinping speaks thickly, but about a system for the Chinese. It never, unlike Soviet Moscow, promoted its reading of socialism to other countries. Business are business.

In any case, the great specter sung by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 continues to haunt Europe, there in the form of leftovers to be paid by geopolitics, but also in a ghostly way in other parts of the world —as the Chilean elections proved and the Brazilian ones, from 2022, will prove it.

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