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NEWS & LETTERS, February - March 2009
World in View
Russia-Ukraine clash
by Gerry Emmett
Hundreds of thousands of European homes went without heat, and factories were forced to close for two weeks in January, as Russia and Ukraine clashed over the oil shipped by Russia's Gazprom through Ukraine's pipelines. The crisis ended, for the moment, when Russian Prime Minister Putin and Ukraine's Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko signed a ten-year gas delivery agreement on Jan. 19.
As in the recent war in Georgia, imperial rivalries were involved. The subtext of the episode was the effort by Putin's government to put pressure on Ukraine for its intent to join NATO and the European Union. The gas crisis meant that Putin's government was willing to be seen in Europe as an unreliable gas supplier, in order to impose the same price on Ukraine.
The move did succeed in influencing the internal politics of Ukraine, pitting Tymoshenko against President Viktor Yushchenko, whom she has criticized in the past for involvement with RosUkEnergo, the middleman in the shipment of Russian gas which is half owned by Gazprom and half by Ukrainian businessmen. The company has been accused of kickbacks and corruption. The new agreement would eliminate RosUkEnergo's role and will be an issue in Ukraine's upcoming presidential election.
The ability to outmaneuver Ukraine's politicians reflects Putin's success in co-opting and marginalizing his own internal opposition. The remnants of Russia's liberal reformers of the 1990s now exist in an unprincipled anti-Putin alliance with the "red-brown" National Bolshevik Party (NBP) as part of former chess champion Garry Kasparov's "Other Russia." Meanwhile Putin's government has built upon the economic reforms, which were made at the expense of the working class, and at the same time taken on the NBP's ideologist, Aleksandr Dugin, as an important state adviser.
With falling oil prices driving economic crisis, there is new opposition rising. Thousands demonstrated in Vladivostok and other cities at the beginnng of February. The dire situation of the Russian opposition today was addressed in a recent essay by poet-activist Kirill Medvedev. He describes a new turning point, in which "a task that was wholly bungled at the beginning of the '90s is once again taking center stage: the creation of a real left-wing movement, based on workers' autonomy, on independent labor unions, on the cooperation of grassroots movements and organizations."
Medvedev writes, "The real need now is for the emergence of a new stratum of leftist intellectuals who have mastered the history of leftist thought, leftist politics, leftist art of the 20th century and who have, through Western Marxism and neo-Marxism, recognized their participation in the international socialist project. This is, undoubtedly, the cultural and political goal of humanity--because it is precisely a participation in self-government on as broad a scale as possible--and not the possibility of a career, pure art, or a private life--that is the next step, without which humanity is doomed to moral and physical degeneration. The old slogan 'socialism or barbarism' has become unbelievably relevant." ("The Writer in Russia," Dissent, Fall 2008.)
In today's Russia, this amounts to a call for a new attitude to objectivity.
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