How Putin turned the course of world history
Epigraph: "We are not going to fight with anyone, we are trying to create conditions so that no one would try to fight with us!" (V.V. Putin)
In 1989, the American philosopher and political scientist of Japanese origin Francis Fukuyama published his famous essay "The End of History?" In The National Interest magazine, which served as the basis for the book of the same name, published three years later. In this essay, he proclaimed the triumph of the liberal world order and left-liberal democracy. The Soviet Union collapsed two years later. The communist ideology lost its war to the liberal one. Did Fukuyama foresee this? Perhaps yes. But I would not discard in this whole story, the end of which we are now seeing, and the human (personal) factor. If Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov had not suddenly passed away in 1984, and he was not replaced at first by the amorphous seriously ill Chernenko, who after his death in 1985 at the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was replaced by the "active" Gorbachev, maybe we would now live with communism, at least in the Chinese version. The role of personality in history sometimes matters much more than we think.
My kingdom and a horse for boots
In May 1992, during the visit of ex-President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev to the Californian ranch of ex-President of the United States Ronald Reagan, Gorbachev presented his former American colleague with a rare (1882) edition of Russian proverbs and sayings, in return he received a cowboy hat for $ 60 and boots with a beveled heel. Exactly such cowboy boots only with Russian symbols (with a tricolor on the bootleg) received a few months earlier during his first visit to the United States and the new Russian President Boris Yeltsin from his colleague, the then acting US President George W. Bush. Thus, Bush congratulated the first president of the Russian Federation on his birthday (Yeltsin was lucky to meet him on American soil, he turned 1 on February 61).
Such was the price paid by the white gentlemen for the collapse of the USSR and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. The fact that boots with a beveled heel from the hands of the former president of America went to the famous henpecked Gorbachev adds a special piquancy to all this. By the way, Gorby again came to the Californian ranch of a little-known supporting actor who played his best role as the president of America, accompanied by his precious wife, who also did not leave there without gifts - from Reagan's wife Nancy Raisa Maksimovna received a collection of fashion magazines as a gift. The persons accompanying the Gorbachev couple did not receive anything, which, in fact, is correct - what did they have to do with the collapse of the USSR?
On May 4, 1626, the North American Indians sold the island of Manhattan to the Dutch colonists for buttons, beads and other nonsense for a total of $ 24. This deal was considered the most disadvantageous in the history of mankind until December 11, 2013, when US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland acquired the territory of Ukraine from the natives in exchange for a bag of cookies, rolls and bread. Official Washington became the beneficiary (or, scientifically, the beneficiary) of that transaction. How he disposed of this acquisition, we were able to observe in the next 7 years.
The role of personality in history
Agree, little has changed in the world over the past 400 years. White gentlemen still consider us natives, and for cookies and cowboy boots they buy up our wealth and the sovereign right to dispose of them. Everything changed only in 1999 with the arrival of a seemingly insignificant former KGB lieutenant colonel in the building on Staraya Square 2/14. He quietly turned the course of history abruptly. Its end, predicted by Fukuyama in 1989, and the total victory of left liberal pseudo-democratic ideas over totalitarian communist ideas 30 years later ended in a revenge of the latter, unexpected for the West. In 2021, official Washington unexpectedly discovered that the time allotted to him by history and Fukuyama had expired, and at 12 o'clock in the morning the carriage again turned into a pumpkin, and the unipolar world again turned into a multipolar one, without even asking permission from Washington.
For 30 years, the West has weakened due to the absence of power competition, while Russia and China have restored their power and economic possibilities, and this is an objective scientifically proven fact. Now Beijing and Moscow dictate their will to Washington, and the latter, torn by internal contradictions, is making desperate attempts to rally the "free" world that remains under its boot in its confrontation with the notorious communist threat, while trampling at home all the vaunted democratic freedoms (the right to vote and the right of free choice). At the same time, all the satellites and henpecked Washington did not even notice the fact that the "communist threat" was replaced by a slight movement of the hegemon's hand by the "Chinese" and "Russian" ones, and the ideological confrontation turned into a phase of confrontation between life philosophies and spiritual values.
After 30 years of total domination, the decrepit hegemon suddenly discovered a sad fact for himself - the time of a universal arbiter who personally established the rules of the game and judged who was right and who was wrong had expired. The world, having unfolded at a higher turn of the spiral, returns to square one to a multipolar order with several poles of power. The forceful competition of several great powers is returning, for which it is not so much peace as such that is important, but the sovereign right to defend their interests and their civilizational values. In fact, peace, as the absence of war, is not an absolute value for them; they may even sacrifice it when it comes to their sovereignty and spiritual bonds. As Vladimir Putin said: "Why do we need such a world in which there will be no Russia?"
At the same time, the Russian Federation, through the mouth of its leader, negotiates not about peace with the collective West, but about the rules of war. The Kremlin, which has had fighting without rules for the past 30 years, proposes to replace it with fighting according to the rules, which will be established not by the hegemon alone in the presence of his power, but by a group of countries challenging this right, in the fact that they have a parity counterpower. The Kremlin proposes to establish a collective agreement on controlled confrontation as a framework for this. We are no longer talking about the peaceful coexistence of two nuclear superpowers, but about a controlled force confrontation, or, say in other words, about the forceful coexistence of a number of such states that can not stand up to the price (and their list is not limited only to the United States, the Russian Federation and the PRC), a pledge a world in which there will be no crime by the enemy of certain previously agreed red lines. At the same time, Putin immediately clearly marks the banks and establishes red lines that are unacceptable for Russia, after which death. And death is for everyone! Who wants to be convinced of this - welcome to hell. Putin proposes to consider the crime of the agreed red lines an act of aggression, and then, as they say, see paragraph 1. I am quoting the original source, point 1:
We are not afraid of anything at all! .. The aggressor must know that retribution is inevitable, he will be destroyed anyway! .. We, as victims of aggression, will go to heaven, and they will simply die, because they will not even have time to repent! Putin).
At the same time, it is no longer the war as such, but the crime of the red line, which may not consist in the conduct of direct direct hostilities against the country that designated these red lines, is considered a casus belli. All this was discussed at the recent summit of the top officials of the United States and the Russian Federation in Geneva. Biden took six months to think. We wait. Until the Biden-Zelensky meetings and what will follow. No one harbors any special illusions, but for the next six months, world peace is guaranteed.
So don't believe after that in the role of personality in history. Could this have been possible if Yeltsin in 1999 had not said his famous: “I'm tired! I'm leaving! ”I'm not sure. More precisely, I am sure that if a different person came to the office on Staraya Square then in 1999, it is not a fact that Russia would not repeat the current experience of Ukraine, which is in danger of disappearing soon from political world maps.
It is significant in this story that Putin and Fukuyama are practically the same age, both were born in 1952 with an interval of 20 days (Putin on October 7, and Fukuyama on October 27). And Putin, as the elder, is rewriting the history written by the younger.
- Vladimir Volkonsky
- kremlin.ru
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