The Russian president’s invasion of Ukraine threatens the safety of the entire world. Writers on Russian history and politics suggest possible ways forward.
Putin, unlike Maria in The Sound of Music, isn’t a problem with an easy solution. But let’s concentrate on what may be achievable. Here’s a brief and imperfect list: — Vladimir Putin: 5 leading writers on Russia have their say
What do we think happens to the money we pay for Russian gas? How do we imagine western multinationals secure oil-drilling rights dispensed by a regime we know to be corrupt? Who do we think is behind the companies of anonymous ownership, registered in places like Guernsey, Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, that we continue to allow to participate in our economies?
* How do we deal with that?Sanctions-busting deals between Iran, Venezuela and Russia – respectively kleptocracies with Islamist, socialist and imperialist masks – reveal that this alternative is already taking shape. The leaders of the Chinese kleptocracy will use this opportunity to bolster their position at the head of this new order
We are watching the rise of what I’ve called Kleptopia.*
An undeclared, unconventional war between kleptocracy and democracy has been under way since long before Putin’s troops marched into Ukraine.
Not the focus of this discussion.The question is more what's happening — Shwah
They only reference the kleptocracy of russia in the first essay (and once in the third) and never "kleptopia" (which is a much larger discussion).
So you just mean how to solve kleptocracy as detailed in the first essay (business elites get passing mention in the second)? — Shwah
Much as I share Tolstoy’s scepticism about the individual’s impact on history, to a significant extent this is Vladimir Putin’s war. Determined to reverse the entropy for which he blames Gorbachev, Putin believes in the transhistorical unity of Great Russia, Little Russia and White Russia. Ukraine as such does not exist.
Listening to voices from the region. A good place to start is Ukrainian activist and historian Taras Bilous’s essay, A Letter to the Western Left from Kyiv (published recently on openDemocracy), which corrects many of the British media cliches about insuperable linguistic, cultural, historical and geographical divides and the influence of the far right...
... Rather than ostracising works of art, try to understand the complex history of Russian imperialism. Pushkin’s To the Slanderers of Russia (1831) told western critics that Russia’s repression of Poland was a family affair. But Evdokiya Rostopchina’s The Forced Marriage (1845) presented Russia and Poland as an abusive husband and defiant wife – provoking outrage in Nicholas I.
Well, I've just read the article with its 5 essays plus BTL comments and I'm seriously depressed.
1. Tom Burgis: ‘To confront his kleptocracy, we must first cease our complicity in it’.
2. Catriona Kelly: ‘We must try to understand the complex history of Russian imperialism’.
3. Oliver Bullough: ‘We can deprive him and his cronies of access to their wealth’.
4. Ruth Deyermond: ‘Closing contact will confirm Putin’s narrative that the west wants to destroy Russia’.
5. Peter Pomerantsev: ‘Solving the problem means confronting the psychological grip he has on people’. — Amity
The rulers of the west applied the same logic to Putin as they applied to the rulers of DRC or Kazakhstan. They wanted to buy these countries’ commodities so they pretended the kleptocrats were legitimate leaders with whom they could do business. They kept this up when he murdered exiled dissidents abroad, when he stole South Ossetia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014, all the while developing a tribal imperialist spiel to stir fealty at home. After 22 years of this, Putin evidently believes his own propaganda that he is a statesman
As well as accepting that we have so emboldened him that we may well have to meet him on the battlefield, to confront Putin’s kleptocracy, we must first cease our complicity in it. What do we think happens to the money we pay for Russian gas? How do we imagine western multinationals secure oil-drilling rights dispensed by a regime we know to be corrupt? Who do we think is behind the companies of anonymous ownership, registered in places like Guernsey, Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands, that we continue to allow to participate in our economies? — Tom Burgis
Push for proper peace talks, accompanied by a full ceasefire, and with participation in the talks of observers trusted by both sides. — Catriona Kelly
Putin is not Hitler or Benito Mussolini, he is not even Joseph Stalin, he is a modern problem, and solving a problem like him requires new skills, new sacrifices, and new laws.
[The oligarchs] have moved at least half of their wealth out of Russia, and spent it on houses, yachts, football clubs, fine art and more. Their investment managers have been in London, Luxembourg and New York
Being able to bury their wealth deep in our economies has allowed Russia’s rulers to avoid the consequences of their own greed: their children have studied in English schools; their wealth has been invested in western funds; their German-built yachts fly under the flags of British tax havens. — Oliver Bullough
European states and the US need to recognise that there is no going back to the world before February 2022. On issues of strategic stability, cooperation, energy security, and indulgence towards the oligarch money that has corrupted their politics, there has to be a commitment to permanent change.
Western states also need to acknowledge how badly they miscalculated both their relationship with Russia and the international significance of Russia’s relations with its post-Soviet neighbours. Too often in the 30 years since the collapse of the USSR, the US, the UK and others have treated Russia as little more than an irritating obstacle to getting on with the more serious business of world politics in the Middle East or east Asia. At the same time, some European states clearly prioritised energy relations with Russia over questions about where Russian foreign policy was heading.
One of the triggers for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine seems to have been the mixed signalling over Ukraine’s Nato membership, which was neither ruled out nor firmly ruled in. Nato and the EU both need to decide, and to communicate clearly, whether they plan to admit the remaining post-Soviet states that want to become members, and what the relationship with them will look like if they don’t.
At the same time, even if it is unpalatable to talk about it now, there will also need to be engagement with the Russian government in some areas, as there was between the west and the USSR even in dark periods of the cold war such as the early 1980s. — Ruth Deyermond
Putin himself calls the Ukrainians Nazis, as if this unprovoked aggression is somehow a rerun of the Soviet people’s self-defence in the second world war. That accusation is disgusting, but it’s harder to dismiss the parallels between Putin’s own behaviour and those of the dictators of the mid-20th century.
He is driven by a perverse misreading of history to deny his neighbours’ humanity. Russian officials and politicians are aggressive in their patriotism. The orange-and-black striped medal ribbon became the nationalist symbol when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, and the air-recognition-mark “Z” has rapidly morphed into an equivalent for this new war.
Putin is a bully who invades his neighbours and kills his critics, and whose government lies compulsively, even about facts that are so self-evidently true that denying them seems self-defeating...
...The Russian elite’s patriotism and anti-western posturing is performative...
Neutrality is largely in the eye of the beholder, and if the Kremlin regards states as de facto allies of the US, lack of Nato membership is unlikely to protect them from whatever forms of aggression it will be capable of after Ukraine.
However hostile the relationship between Russia and the west becomes, dialogue on nuclear matters needs to be maintained.
declarations that we are turning it off – that, as Boris Johnson put it, “there is no place for dirty money in the UK” – are laughable. A few names on sanctions lists and some loophole-ridden reforms to economic crime laws not backed by budgets to enforce them are close to meaningless while we still permit financial secrecy. — Tom Burgis
She described her act as a desperate attempt to cleanse her conscience for having “zombified” the Russian people.
The mental model of Putinism, the worldview it constructs with propaganda of word and deed to keep Russians under control, is built on several foundations: it appeals to nostalgia; it projects a conspiratorial perspective and it insists that Putin can get away with anything, that there is no alternative to Putin.
The nostalgia narrative allows the Kremlin to transfer its own brutality on to a shadowy outside “enemy”, and then help people relieve their pent-up anger through aggression. The abusive, sadistic tone of Putin’s speeches, and the ones of his leading TV propagandists such as Vladimir Solovyov, give people an emotional path to articulate and validate their darkest and most violent feelings. It’s OK to be vicious and mean, this propaganda implies, it’s all history’s fault.
Thinking about the future means concentrating on political reforms, cleaning up the courts, abolishing corruption – all things Putin cannot achieve, as they will put his own system in danger...
Media and communication with the Russian people needs to focus on these questions about the future. Both on the personal level, but also in terms of the future of the country.
...a group of Russian academics led by historian Alexander Etkind propose to create a university in the Baltics that will bring students from Russia and its neighbours to work on common challenges such as the environment.
They will have to rely on tracing documents and open-source investigations. We will need a whole new iteration of what the Russian journalist and editor Roman Badanin, founder of the investigative online media outlet Agentstvo, calls “offshore journalism”: exile media that uses modern tools to stay as close to the home country as possible.
Putin will turn to the power ministries to use oppression rather than ideas. This has always been his final argument: that he can carry out any crimes at home, any invasion abroad, any war crime from Grozny to Aleppo, and get away with it.
In Ukraine, Putin is purposefully targeting humanitarian corridors, bombing refugees and hospitals in order to break the will of the people. It’s a message to the world that all statements about humanitarian values, the UN’s “responsibility to protect”, “safe zones” is guff.
His argument is that might is right, and in the futureless new world the ones who are most ruthless, from Beijing to Riyadh and Moscow, will flourish.
One small, first, but hopefully important step has been taken by the human rights lawyer and author Philippe Sands, who is trying to create a Nuremberg-style tribunal for those who began this war, not merely for war crimes but for having started a completely unprovoked invasion in the first place.
In a nutshell, declare "action taken", general population applauds, no extra money or effort just a few letters added to laws we don't really enforce, no change.
If we want to be serious about change, the change needs to be fundamental, which means more, better and more effective democracy, not just political but especially economical. — Benkei
This is further complicated by hero worship having shifted to business men. We look to oligarchs for answers in fields they don't know anything about. — Benkei
So we need political, cultural and economic change and these changes need to be fundamental. The incremental or technocratic tweaking of liberals and democratic socialists is never going to be good enough. — Benkei
As a finance minister of UK or Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak will get salary around £71,090 so if we make prediction then his net worth would be around £2 million. Apart from this, he is also a director of the investment firm owned by his father in law named Catamaran Ventures.
Understood and understandable.'m less concerned with fixing Russia before my own country and the EU are fixed. — Benkei
I think an intermediary step that is getting traction more widely is a stakeholder capitalism. — Benkei
Your title is "How to solve a problem: like Putin" and I thought it may be about the different archetypes of "problem-solving" using Putin as a stand-in for an archetype and as a case study. — Shwah
I think more economic and tax justice in our own countries will mean they are less prone to abuse by foreign oligarchs as well. — Benkei
I think it's been over-said that your conversation topic being limited to the 5 essays will never answer your question and that you should've been clear you wanted no more answer than what the 5 essays professed. — Shwah
Understood and understandable.
The article is about 'a problem like Putin' with a focus on his war.
We are concerned because of the wider repercussions and implications.
That includes our own countries.
Putin presents the biggest and most present danger not only to Ukraine... — Amity
And any closer to a solution? — Benkei
If the government sets it up and it offers a tax break (since redistribution is build into the system) it might actually just work within the existing system. — Benkei
Introducing social credit system as an economic system of value or even promoting digital currencies may help but we have to see this completely as a failure of the west or the west loses the right of hegemony as a superpower (which it's already had chipped away). The sanctions are further arguing against any proper western hegemony.
For history this will be viewed less as "Putin's war" and more as a continual fall of western hegemony that started with its domestic issues, went through afghanistan and the covid conspiracies and finally here. — Shwah
How do we deal with that?
— Amity
Through revolutions, like we did in the past — Olivier5
Self-criticism. This is my way. If a person practices self-criticism, that person cannot be so destructive, because that person will continuously ask to herself: “What am I doing? Is it good? Is it intelligent? Will it help progress?”. If Hitler had a habit of self-criticism, he would have thought, every second of his life: “What am I doing?”. — Angelo Cannata
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