Let’s start with the obvious: Russian President Vladimir Putin is an authoritarian bully who is bulldozing Ukraine today. He follows an unbroken tradition of illiberality. His predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, too, who emerged from the ruins of the USSR’s disintegration, was anything but democratic, a ‘monarchial presidency’ at best (Yeltsin had infamously got the Russian military to bomb and storm the Parliament).
The unsmiling cold war Soviet leadership, earlier Stalin and Lenin, or still earlier the monarchial Tsarist and the Princes of Ancient Rus’, were all varying shades of autocracy. Russia never had a working democracy. This does not necessarily make its governance amoral, only different – a difference that perhaps matters (or perhaps doesn’t) only to the Russians. But the euphemistic ‘West’ has always painted the Russian Bear to be the cold-blooded and stereotypical Ivan Drago of the Rocky series – former Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, had called the USSR “the evil empire”.
Russians Are Always the 'Villains'
In the binary mapping of Western conscience, Russians are always the villains and Putin is personifying that imagination. This is clearly an over-simplistic, convenient, and manufactured perception, which hides as much as it reveals. The ‘West’ has commensurate blood on its hands but covers its tracks much better.
Is the popular narrative on the Ukraine crisis carrying the Russian perspective? Earlier history? Or precedents with similar dynamics? The short answer is, no.
The increasingly corporatised media of the ‘West’ has lost its penchant for independence, investigation and enquiry that was still prevalent earlier, even if sparingly.
Counter-intuitively, the so-called deepening of democracy in the ‘West’ has made its ‘narrative-building’ machine even more efficacious (even as the impoverished streets of the Middle East, Latin America, Africa or Asian continent often harbour a very different perception, one which remains essentially unheard, or, at least, under-represented).
India should know from its own memory of being a Soviet ally during the cold war days.
When India Faced the ‘Western’ Narrative-Building Machine
In 1971, Pakistan was a US ally, whereas India was relatively in the Soviet camp. Archer K Blood, the US Consul General to then-East Pakistan (soon to be Bangladesh), was dispatching explicit reportage of Pakistani Military’s butchery. Kenneth B Keating, the US Ambassador to India, corroborated in-person to Nixon and Kissinger duo, about the ensuing ‘matter of genocide’ (these brave diplomats were called ‘maniac’, ‘traitor’ etc., by their own unhinged government for speaking the truth).
The US State Department had confirmed Pakistani war crimes of 200,000 murders (the figure was changed to 3 million by the subsequent Bangladeshi government), mass rapes and loot. Yet, the US had openly supported the perpetrators of the carnage, supplied arms, did not ask for restoration of peace or stoppage of genocide, did not ask for honouring of electoral results or will, and did not talk of any ‘sanctions’, much-heard in the Ukraine crisis.
Shockingly, US President Nixon then said that the Indians need ‘a mass famine’, whereas his obliging jester and known India-hater, Henry Kissinger, mocked those who ‘bleed’ for ‘the dying Bengalis’.
Coup de grace was the menacing sailing of the US Naval flotilla from the 7th fleet, into the Bay of Bengal – India was the unequivocal target, not Pakistan. Amidst the atrocities, mayhem and plunder of unprecedented scale, India emerged as the initial instigator and aggressor for the ‘West’, till facts became too overbearing to sustain that narrative.
The Taliban & ISIS
Ummah (Muslim World) is repeatedly painted with dark colours for its religious extremism and terror-nurseries, but the parallel and invaluable role of the US in the creation of these extremist elements and then abandoning them recklessly to proliferate is never adequately covered. That the Taliban are the progeny of the CIA-ISI wedlock in the 1980s, or the ISIS a byproduct of Saddam Hussein’s deliberately disowned and humiliated Iraqi Army left to fend for itself, is never posited forcefully.
Iran, which has had no proven linkages to 9/11 or to the creation of phenomena like al Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, etc., remains the ‘Number One Global Terror Sponsor’.
Though Iran has seen electoral processes, women’s emancipation and even has a reserved seat for native Jews in its Shura, the US’ ‘monopoly’ on truth ensures the continuing demonisation of Iran and simultaneous support to the most puritanical and undemocratic regimes in the Sheikhdoms.
This is not to exonerate any side of misdemeanour, but only to call out the selective narrative that furthers an imbalanced impression. As an example, when global nuclear proliferation watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), routinely confirmed the compliance of all commitments by Iran in the nuclear deal (as indeed by all other P5+1 members), why was there no call for punitive action against the US for unilateral reneging? More importantly, why does Iran continue to be vilified and sanctioned, even today?
The Cuban Crisis of 1962
The politically compromised Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, supported the curated din across the pond on Ukraine by co-warning “the biggest war in Europe since 1945”. The allusion to an imagined World War 3 is unmistakable. Putin may well be the imperial-nostalgist of the erstwhile USSR, using sham KGB tactics of ‘separatists’ to do his neo-Soviet bidding in Ukraine, but what explains his relative popularity amongst Russians, contrary to what is postulated?
The mismatch in Western perception versus reality is exemplified by the lonely figure of Mikhail Gorbachev, who is feted and honoured in the West but scorned by the Russians. Living in an isolated dacha outside Moscow, Gorbachev is a pale shadow of a former leader who is blamed for having lost an empire, shamed Russia, and has consistently emerged as the most hated person of the Soviet era. Putin has taken a leaf out of that insight and plays to the gallery, as does the ‘West’ to its own. Fair distribution of blame is the casualty.
The closest the world ever came to portents of World War 3 was in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. It was a virtual role-reversal of the current Ukraine saga – a sovereign country seeking to implement its free will was denied from doing so by a neighbouring rival that was significantly more powerful but felt threatened by the evolving preferences of its smaller neighbour (see the pattern?). Fidel Castro was always anti-Yankee but never a communist to start with; he had hated Stalin all along. But the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion and multiple curbs imposed by its intimidating neighbour, ie, the US, had forced it into the Soviet camp.
The Soviets were licking their wounds with the provocation of Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey aimed at the USSR, and readily agreed to Cuba’s request for nuclear missiles to deter possible invasion by the US (there were many Crimea-like attempts, albeit by the US, that too, in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine).
Fearing natural security concerns by the presence of an ‘enemy’ on its borders, 140 km away from the US mainland, the US imposed an unwarranted ‘blockade’ and invasion plans (OPLAN 316 & 312) to attack Cuba (Russians know a precedent, an American one).
What a Fair Compromise in Ukraine Would Mean
In a syntax reminiscent of how Putin might possibly refer to Joe Biden, Nikita Khrushchev had remarked, “I know for certain that Kennedy doesn’t have a strong background, nor, generally speaking, does he have the courage to stand up to a serious challenge.” War stakes were raised, the world was dangerously on the brink of World War 3, and negotiations were afloat on the sidelines. Familiar?
The crisis ended with a fair compromise that Cuban missiles would be removed but the invasion of Cuba by the US was to be shelved, and the US missile sites from Italy and Turkey, removed. It is exactly this sort of security compromise of deterring the ‘enemy’ of NATO from its border that has led to Putin’s belligerence, besides other factors.
Like all ‘deals’ entailing the West, the reciprocal compromises made by the US in the Cuban missile crisis were hidden from the public gaze, and a narrative, that the Soviets had blinked first, was manufactured.
What was proverbially good for the goose then is today not good for the gander. The logic of the Cuban missile crisis rings true for the Ukrainian crisis in spirit but is denied the formulaic application today. As the West retains the monopoly on truth and history with better marketing, Russia is for all practical and popular imagination the singular ‘Devil’ – as is Iran in its own context, as was India in 1971.
The much-needed compromise in Ukraine will only happen if a fair assessment of all perspectives, earlier ‘deals’, and historical precedents are presented – unbiasedly.
(Lt Gen Bhopinder Singh (Retd) is a former Lt Governor of Andaman and Nicobar Islands & Puducherry. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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