Russia:
Coronation of the Godfather
André Glucksmann
Translated by Douglas
French original: "Russie: le sacre du parrain"
(Le Monde, 2003/05/30)In The Man Without Qualities, a novel no diplomat should ignore, Robert Musil recounts the final hours of a Europe destined to explode. Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is mobilizing its elites. Emperor Franz Josef, crowned in 1848, is four years away from celebrating the 70th year of his reign. The “Alles-Wien,” Europe, the entire world would soon pay homage to “the emperor of peace.”
With grand speeches, grand words and grand things. The charitable would offer their good works, the moral, their enoblements and the poets, their poems. A “planning committee for the 70th anniversary of the advent of His Majesty” stated: the Austro-global year shall begin under the auspices of “Capital and Culture.” None would ever know what this high-flown title signified. There wasn’t time. Sarajevo rang in the end of the game.
Who, at the dawn of the 21st century, hears an echo of the nascent 20th? Honestly! In what way does our Europe, the world’s greatest economic power, which boasts refinements unknown to the roughneck soldiers from across the Atlantic, resemble the Austro-Hungary bound to “Capital” and “Culture”? Musil called “parallel action” that boundless agitation that took hold of the best minds. Their total involvement existed in “parallel,” so self-sufficient that their chatter stretched out to infinity without ever encountering reality. “We have been as those sleeper-train travelers who awake only at the moment of the train’s collision.” Only a man without qualities, or a despairing Chechen, would think to compare the jubilee of Franz Josef to the apotheosis of Vladimir.
The poshest leaders on the planet will land on 30 May at Saint-Petersburg. For its 300th anniversary, the city of Peter the Great will receive 45 heads of State, 13,000 foreign guests and 2,000 journalists. All shall raise a glass to the health of the master of the house, Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin, who has been putting the finishing touches on his apotheosis for three years.
The VIPs will stay on the banks of the Gulf of Finland, in the palais Constantin, the president’s balneary summer residence. They will travel by yacht, on the official pretext that this avoids inconveniencing the urban dwellers, displaced by the party. “The façades of the old buildings lining the avenues down which the official processions will pass will be covered by trompe l’oeil panels, eliciting deplorable comparisons to the Potemkin villages,” mocks Konservator, a liberal periodical in the Venice of the North... Doesn’t this remind you of something? Crimea, Catherine II, her lavish cruise on which crowned heads were doted on by ambassadors, pet followers, men of letters, and other token flatterers. The minister and lover Potemkin erected cardboard decorations depicting order prosperity, luxury. And the majesty of an empress to which a duly and sternly admonished people living in tatters sang.
In 2003, the illustrious guests will show neither concern nor thought for an agonizing population, half of which is fecundating under the poverty line. They will not visit the thousands of abandoned industrial areas where men lay about unemployed and drink, where women try to feed their children, though it may mean prostituting themselves by the side of the road. They will not see abandoned kids taking shelter in the train stations, looking for customers.
Our officials shall clink their glasses with the top brass who are bloodying the Caucasus. They will dine by candlelight with the oligarchs who are “privatizing,” or, as it so happens, “pirating” the country’s riches. To their greater profit and to the glory of a spy they made king. Having in ten years pulled off the biggest hold-up in contemporary history, these corrupted ones, fewer than twenty, are placing their new fortunes in the tax havens of the West.
They will talk business. The Kremlin agit-prop points out that, in the last two years, GDP has been rising modestly, leaving out the fact that this statistical growth is due to the stability of global oil prices (for how long?). The “fundamentals” of the Russian economy are sinister, international experts observe. Capital flight continues. No matter! Jacques Chirac is hoping to enlist Vladimir in his independent Europe. The power in Brussels is dreaming of a euro zone from Porto to Vladivostok. Anti- and pro-nuclear Germans have agreed to the construction in the Urals of the greatest atomic dumping ground in the Universe. Western Europe foresees colonizing Russia. “Modernization,” they claim; a more politically correct euphemism. It remains to be seen who is colonizing whom. On this point, by virtue of its experience, Warsaw can hear with different ears: the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis doesn’t fail to evoke bitter memories.
They will talk “war on terror.” Putin will present his grand colonial and genocidal deeds as so many exemplary contributions. Though it please not the pacifists, in the Iraq-Chechnya contest of demolitions, the Americans are the butt of jokes, while Russia takes pride in its immeasurable ruins and while the dead in its wake are counted by the hundred thousand.
France (private? public?) is offering its anti-war companion a tower “for peace”: 17 meters of incantation of the word “peace,” carved ad infinitum. “Na zdorov’e!” Champagne and Chechen blood mixed for a strong cocktail. Emmanuel Kant wrote of an inn beside a cemetery, fittingly baptized “To Eternal Peace!” The irony of the Enlightenment will be cruelly absent at the banquet table.
Forgive Russia, ignore Germany, punish France. Strengthened by this precept, George Bush (and his retinue of 700 people) will also come to make friends. How long can he turn a blind eye to those godfather states, behind the rogue ones he denounces, that support them? Would North Korea go nuclear without the complicit silence and the material aid of China, Russia and Pakistan? To his final hours, Saddam Hussein benefited from Moscow’s weaponry. Who is selling nuclear reactors to Iran?
Once the fanfare has died down, it will be time for sober thinking. Yes, Russia’s potential for harm is immense! Second largest arms merchant in the world. Second largest nuclear arsenal. World’s largest circulating currency with an unparalleled capacity for corruption. Yes, for these reasons, we must negotiate with Putin, but not by first forsaking to teach him good democratic manners!
Russia has been drawn in opposite directions for centuries. On one side, despotism and autocracy. On the other, the love of freedom spread by Russia’s heroic culture without which Europe would be orphaned. Let our leaders give no ground in matters of human rights! Let them demand of this country that it respect the treaties it has signed! The war in Chechnya is not a detail that can be drowned with an exchange of smiles. Peace in Chechnya is crucial to the democratic future of Russia. Ilyas Akhmadov, an independentist member of the Duma, is proposing the disarmament of the Chechen forces and the simultaneous retreat of Russian troops. Condemning terrorism wherever it may come from, seeking third-party mediation, an international mandate for (UN) peacekeeping forces, putting off the alternatives of independence or federation for another day, he is creating the beginnings of authentic anti-terrorist peace. In Saint-Petersburg, the democrats would do themselves honor in taking this into account. It is not for them to set Putin right. It is for the president of the Russian Federation to conduct himself without insulting humanity.
André Glucksmann is a philosopher and essayist.
[Posted 2003/06/01]
Copyright © Watch 2001-2006.
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