Russia, still a country of eight time zones and enormous resources, is the epicenter of this troubled world. European and American appeasement of Serb aggression is but one evidence of the importance the great powers attach to `winning' Russian goodwill. Their measured response to Russian atrocities in Chechnya is another. This too is ironic as Russia's centrality in defining the prospects of mankind is underlined at the very moment of its collapse as a great power. We do not know which way the wounded bear shall turn.
Russia's instincts are divided -- humane and thoughtful on the one hand, chauvinist and deadly on the other. Above, I wrote "Boris Yeltsin's Russia" because I see two Russias co-existing uneasily; and a third leaning now to one side, now to another. First, there is the Russia of people like Sergei Kovalev, the Kremlin appointed Commissioner for Human Rights who went to Grozny last December when Yeltsin ordered the assault on Chechnya's capital. There he lived in a dingy fifth-floor apartment without heat or water; and defied Yeltsin's orders to return to Moscow. For weeks he bore the bombings, witnessed the wanton destruction -- civilians killed, the city incinerated. When the Kremlin ordered him to stop briefing the press, he defied again and persistently brought his government's atrocities to the attention of an indifferent world.
In opposing the Kremlin's crimes against humanity, Sergei Kovalev was not alone. By most estimates a majority of Russians oppose Yeltsin's war. Among the thousands who turned up for an anti-war demonstration in Pushkin Square -- there a small group of dissidents had in 1968 protested the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia -- were nearly all the luminaries of Russian art and literature. Elena Bonner, widow of the physicist Andrei Sakharov described the war on the Chechens as "return to totalitarianism" and said that "a democratic country cannot keep by armed force an ethnic group that does not want to remain in it." Former prime minister Yegor T. Gaidar, leader of the ruling coalition in parliament and reputedly a shrewd politician, described Yeltsin's Chechnya invasion as "a massive military crime."
Some of Russia's most senior Generals have openly opposed this war. General Edouard Vorabyev, Deputy Commander of the land forces, refused to lead the army's assault on Grozny; he was demoted to Reserve duty. General Gromov, one of Russia's most respected officers, publicly criticized the military's "barbaric methods", thus jeopardizing his promotion as the next head of the Russian army. Yeltsin dismissed six senior Generals for their opposition to the war; three of them held the post of Deputy Defense Minister. They were Georgi Kondratyev, Viktor Mironov, and Boris Gromov who had led the withdrawal of Russian forces from Afghanistan.
To the right is the Russia of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party which is not liberal and not democratic. Long a figure of ridicule, he should be taken seriously as symbolizing this other Russia -- bigotted, racist, authoritarian, and expansionist. Like all demagogues of his stripe, he is hooked on history, geography and ethnicity, and manipulates, misrepresents, and appropriates all three. An avowed atheist -- still the popular thing to be in Russia -- he supports Serbian aggression on religious grounds: "...all the barbarians who had settled on the sacred Serbian soil have to accept the fact this land belongs to the Serbian people, or leave it." "The Baltic" he wrote, "are Russian land... There will be no Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians in the Baltic. I will act like Hitler in 1932. As for Poland, "it isn't a state really. It is a Russian province." As an Asian power Japan is a threat to western supremacy; it must be wiped out with "new Hiroshimas and Nagasakis." Zhirinovsky's plan for Chechen and other minorities is also straightforward: Russia must "deal with ethnic minorities as Americans did with the Indians, and Germany with the Jews."
Zhirinovsky often changes his line according to what he thinks his audience would like. In the United States last November he denied that he had sent off commandos to help Saddam Hussain's "noble cause" and blow-up U.S. ships; "they were tourists" he insisted. Similarly, he denied his own written words about Poland, the Baltic, or nuking Japan as "total falsehood"; but sensing his audience's antipathies he offered: "watch out for the Chinese and Muslims." Muslims are an obsession of Mr. Zhirinovsky who grew up in Kazakhastan.
This obsession is the center-piece of his book, Last Dash To The South. The Director of the Library of Congress, historian James Billington finds it "in some respects psychologically an even more unstable work that Mein Kampf." The purpose of the "last thrust", says Vladimir Zhirinovsky is "to liberate the world from war which always begins in the South." He invokes the threat to the western world "from the direction of Teheran which is constructing plans for the pan-Islamic seizure of vast territories, from the direction of Ankara where plans for a greater Turkic state were prepared long ago." He believes that "Russia's true and historic role and destiny is to protect christianity from the muslim threat." He would proceed with mission moderately, step by step: first reconquer and abolish the Central Asian republics; then conquer the region from "Karachi to Constantinople." One should note Zhirinovsky's ultimate dreams: "I dream of the day when Russian soldiers can wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean." The objective, of course, is peace: "The sound of the bells of Russian Orthodox churches on the shores of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean will bring peace to those people." Mr. Zhirinovsky hopes the U.S. would see the advantage in sharing the world with a re-vitalized Russia: "It is like two girls and two blokes. The men have to decide which girl is theirs and then there are two couples; everything is friendly."
Don't laugh! This clown represents something just as did the one with the butterfly moustache six decades ago, and just as do Serbia's Milosevich, Karadzic, and Mladic. He embodies the dark side of Russia, and knows also the dirty secret of western leaders who appease Serbian genocide of Bosnian muslims and promote sectarian schemes in the Balkans and Palestine while ringing alarm bells of an Islamic threat to the world. Like most dangerous opportunists Zhirinovsky plays on a people's feelings of humiliation, speaks the language of stark simplicity, and affects a populist posture. "In a rich country", he says, "my program will not go down well. But in a poor and embittered country like Russia this is my golden hour." So he has been making waves, and with each success compels Russia number three -- of Boris Yeltsin and the ambitions which surround him -- and his western allies to accommodate the agenda of Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
In the 1991 presidential election Zhirinovsky surprised the world by winning 7.5 % of the total vote. In the 1993 parliamentary elections his party won the largest bloc of seats in the parliament, polling 23% of popular votes. His following among Russia's disaffected military is known to be strong; and the `former' KGB is suspected of propping his movement.
Yeltsin is obviously responding to the challenge by appropriating Zhirinovsky's program item by item. Four years ago, he was mindful of `Islamic sensitivities' and withheld open support for Serbia. Now he has abandoned that pretense. For two years Yeltsin heeded liberal counsel against precipitating war in Chechnya; then inched toward it throughout 1994 until December when he launched a war of extermination along lines suggested by Zhirinovsky. In 1991, Yeltsin upheld the right of free press; in 1994 the Russian press and the government were already at odds.
As for the United States and allies, in the days when Mikhail Gorbachev was their favored Russian leader, they use to dismiss Boris Yeltsin as a "drunken lout". When he put Grozny to fire, Clinton's White House declared that Chechnya was Russia's "internal affair". On January 20, when Moscow announced that the Chechen capital had fallen after forty days of unequal battle, the New York Times reported the wisdom at the White House: Yeltsin and his aides must be "supported, strengthened, and taken seriously." Obviously, the lout is now their pet. Vladimir Zhirinovsky awaits his turn. Is he kosher? (END)
@ Eqbal Ahmad. February 10, 1995