I’m surprised more attention hasn't been paid to the virulently anti-Soviet nature of Putin’s speech justifying his attack on Ukraine. The general idea has been that Putin hankers to restore the Soviet Union and its system. His past statements that the fall of the USSR was an unmitigated catastrophe is adduced as proof of his "communist" leanings. On the right, he's denounced for this, while on the left, some count it in his favor. But his speech showed just why he thinks the Soviet Union’s fall was so tragic: because it reduced Russia's ability to dominate the peoples of the USSR.
To Putin, the Union was an extension of Russian nationalist power, which was diminished by its collapse. This was the "tragedy," not the loss of an internationalist socialist state. But he went further. The USSR itself was fatally flawed, he said, precisely because it "wrongly" sought (or at least claimed) to give equal weight to all the peoples in the Soviet Union instead of exalting Russian supremacy.
Putin denounced Lenin and Stalin by name for their crimes against Russian nationalism (or "Great Russian Chauvinism," as the Soviets used to call it). He stressed the perfidy of the "Bolsheviks" and their internationalist outlook. In Russian nationalism (and Ukrainian fascism), "Bolsheviks" very often becomes a code-name for "Jews;" Putin was deliberately playing with this trope to fire up nationalist sentiment. "Bolsheviks" brought us to this crisis; "Communists" gave away sacred Russian territory: people who weren't "real" Russians. Putin is no Communist, no leftist; he is, at heart, a crude nationalist (and predatory capitalist), who, like all nationalists, mixes genuine grievances with vainglorious fantasies about the specialness, the "exceptionalism," of one's own people: a concept rooted ultimately in ethnicity and "race." (Like Tucker Carlson’s racist blathering about “legacy Americans," etc.)
Of course, nothing Putin is doing excuses the crimes and hypocrisies of so many of those denouncing him, such as the US/UK elites who have committed, cheered, countenanced and/or forgiven monstrous crimes of their own systems, like the mass-murdering war of aggression against Iraq and the mass-murdering sanctions and theft of national wealth that Biden is now inflicting on Afghanistan, etc. Their atrocities are legion.
But their crimes don't excuse similar crimes committed by others. Nor does the presence of unsavoury elements in Ukraine (such as the Azov battalion and the Banderaites) give moral justification for an attack on Ukraine, any more than the depredations of Saddam's regime "justified" the horrendous war crime against Iraq. To decry a precipitous military action by the rightwing regime in Moscow doesn't mean you now automatically credit everything (or anything) that the proven liars and death-dealing militarists in the US/UK have to say, nor that you must ignore their part in fomenting this crisis and the fact that their own policies in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Kosovo, etc. have given Putin a template to follow and precedents for "justifying" his use of violence to pursue political ends.
But already the "discourse" is veering into the ditch of "either-or": denounce the attack on Ukraine, and you're an imperialist Western stooge; denounce the crimes and hypocrisies of the West and you're a Putin-loving Trumpist traitor. But it is entirely possible to stand outside the political/media establishments of nation-states and try to view things from the perspective of enduring principles, such as Chekhov's belief in "freedom from violence and lies, no matter how these two manifest themselves," and to judge events accordingly.
Here we must look away from the nabobs nattering in DC and London, and turn to wiser, more considered voices, like that of Martin Kimani, Kenya’s ambassador to the UN. His speech to the Security Council, before the broader attack on Ukraine, rightly condemns Putin’s action but also carries within its moral penumbra a condemnation of all such attempts to impose national agendas on others by force. Rooted in the African experience of colonialism, his forthright statement carries none of the hypocrisy of the US/UK, which have literally laid waste to vast swathes of the earth and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in military interventions in this century alone.
A clip of Kimani’s speech quickly went viral. But it is telling that the clip omits his explicit condemnation of “powerful states, including members of this Security Council, breaching international law with little regard. Multilateralism lies on its deathbed tonight. It has been assaulted today as it as it has been by other powerful states in the recent past.”
This is the deeper perspective, borne out of direct experience with the fallout from “dead empires,” that we need to attend to.
