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From 'Pre-Fab' to Putin

putin-prefab

Mommy, where do Putins come from?

Some liberal analysts have suggested that he was parachuted into Russian politics by a sort of malevolent stork.  More critical ones have insisted instead that he was asexually spawned by Yeltsin in his own image.

Yet in the latest edition of the London Review of Books, Neal Ascherson reviews a book that goes beyond casting blame on the 1990s era democrats and implicates the entire post 1989 New World Order.

The ‘pre-fab’ is not some Soviet style housing block, but rather one of three possible scenarios for the unification of Europe in the wake of the fall of the wall discussed in Maria Sarotte’s latest history of 1989: ‘The Struggle to Create a Post Cold War Europe’.

According to this scenario, ‘the West retained all its existing institutions and simply shoved them eastwards’. But there was a compelling alternative left in the dust of 1989: Gorbachev’s model of a ‘common European home’, a demilitarised confederation of capitalist and socialist states from the Atlantic to the Urals, without Nato or Warsaw Pact, organised around Helsinki institutions or the OSCE.

In the victory of the old fashioned pre-fab model over the ambitious/utopian ‘common home’, writes Ascherson,  “the chance to build a solid bridge between Europe and Russia was missed. ‘Pre-fab’ led to Putin”.

It didnt help, of course, that modern Europe was built on a lie: Kohl’s famous promise to Gorbachev that if he lets the GDR go, then NATO would not expand East of Germany.  Yet 15 years later, “Nato had reached Estonia, only 100 miles from St Petersburg…The West cheated [Gorbachev]”, Ascherson declares.

As a result, write Sarotte and Ascherson, “a new European order might have been created, with Russia as a willing partner. Instead, the expansion of Nato ‘perpetuated the military diving line between Nato and its biggest strategic threat, Russia, into the post-Cold War world'”.

Putin certainly exploited this Cold War situation to his advantage, but he did not create it. Rather, as Sarotte and Ascherson show, it created him.

 

Author

Vadim Nikitin

Vadim Nikitin was born in Murmansk, Russia and grew up there and in Britain. He graduated from Harvard University with a thesis on American democracy promotion in Russia. Vadim's articles about Russia have appeared in The Nation, Dissent Magazine, and The Moscow Times. He is currently researching a comparative study of post-Soviet and post-Apartheid nostalgia.
Areas of Focus:
USSR; US-Russia Relations; Culture and Society; Media; Civil Society; Politics; Espionage; Oligarchs

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