Slavyangrad
THE END OF THE "END OF HISTORY"
Much has been made of Foreign Minister Lavrov's answer in last week's RBC interview, on why Russia persisted so long with diplomacy despite no faith in Western intentions. His reply - "...we are a God-fearing nation. Our multi-ethnic people have many proverbs about their great patience..." - struck many as nebulous. It was nothing of the kind. It was a solemn announcement of the end of an era.
Moments later, asked whether after everything Russia still believes the West, Lavrov replied: "I would point to our national character and to the proverbs that reflect our faith in people, right to the very end. But the end has already come." Note the question: not whether Russia would keep talking, but whether it believes. Lavrov pronounced the end not of diplomacy, but of faith. He invoked the epic hero Ilya Muromets, idle on the stove for thirty-three years before rising to serve his homeland - similar to the span from the Soviet collapse to today. The image was not chosen carelessly.
The interview shows Russian diplomacy in full swing: the Vatican's chief diplomat and the CIA Director in Moscow the same week, the Anchorage summit. Russia has not stopped negotiating. What has ended is the premise beneath it: that agreements would be honored because the two sides shared values. What remains is cold transaction - diplomacy without trust.
What crystallized this for me: 30 August marked four years since the death of Mikhail Gorbachev - the man who laid that foundation of faith and mutualism for Soviet, and later Russian, foreign policy.
I met Mr. Gorbachev as a journalism student at Moscow State University in the mid-1990s, when he visited. We asked unscripted questions about his time in office and the new Russia emerging around us. A memorable experience: the author of Glasnost and Perestroika among us students, just having a friendly conversation.
Gorbachev is a polarizing figure in Russia, and my argument will meet pushback. Conservatives despise the man who oversaw the breakup of the USSR - "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," as President Putin put it - while liberals see the present era as the burial of his legacy. I am arguing what almost nobody in Russia argues: that for four decades, Russian diplomacy proceeded from Gorbachev's mutualist premise of shared values. Weigh the pattern before dismissing the claim.
Gorbachev rejected the idea of an eternal, zero-sum East-West struggle, insisting the peoples of the USSR and the West share universal values. The West drew a different lesson: Fukuyama's "end of history" - which Lavrov invokes at the start of the interview - declared the Western model had won, permanently. Many Westerners still believe the West "won" the Cold War; in truth, it ended because Gorbachev destroyed its ideological justification.
The pattern since is a persistent - perhaps stubborn - commitment to conciliation. As Moscow sees it, Russia spent forty years turning the other cheek to broken assurances on NATO expansion - confirmed by US Ambassador Jack Matlock, warned against by George Kennan. Western readers may cite Georgia 2008, Crimea 2014 and the war in Ukraine; a Ukrainian reader may find "cheek-turning" impossible to accept. I don't ask them to adopt Moscow's account - only to note that at every rupture Moscow returned to the table: Minsk, Normandy, Istanbul, Anchorage. Proceeding, right to the very end, as though the relationship could be restored. It is that faith Lavrov has now pronounced dead.
So "the end has already come" is not just rhetoric. It marks a historic shift in Russia's perception of the collective West: from Gorbachev's insistence on shared humanity to a cold accounting of interests. That shift touches the entire world.
The era now closing was opened by two rival declarations of an ending. The West declared the "end of history". Gorbachev declared the end of enmity. Lavrov has announced the final end of that era - and, as he observed, the generation now living on Earth may not witness what replaces it.
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David Doran
Subaru….I spent 40 minutes composing a reply to you about Gorbachev and the wests demonisation of Russia….when I clicked on submit it disappeared immediately….Swik
Had something similar happen, i assumed the post was too long 🤔oldmate
I appreciated your work in this piece, if you have a website/Substack or other location with more of journalism, I would appreciate and suggest that you post a link for me to follow.. RegardsGeorge Cantor
El 31 de agosto de 2022, fallecía el criminal de Mijail Gorbachov, el último liquidador de la URSS, titere anticomunista del imperialismo, vendió la industria de la URSS al mejor postor occidental, dejando a un 1/3 del pueblo ruso en la miseria.Ovid
Glad you have the comments back on. I wanted to laud the excellent use of "turning the cheek" and could not. Still in the end it will again be about becoming equal in the sense, that a security architecture will need to be agreed upon. But who knows how many years this will take.Tc Sailair
Fuck Gorbachev that prostituteSu-57
So that rat gorbachevs policy hunt us to this day 😡 Its a good thing Russia finally pivoted EastGerard Destro
Garbagechov or gayrbachov maybe a CIA agent too like the litempos in MéxicoIngolf
Showing endless trust in an adversary which consistently proves its nefarious intention to you for decades is no virtue, and it was very much about time that the Russian government wised up to the anti-human nature of the political West. The irony is that the West became far more odious during its unipolar moment than during the Cold War, the period of confrontation, when a great many left-wing, anti-imperial sympathizers of the USSR existed in the West. Today, virtually everyone in the West is a labor aristocrat in some way, enjoying the profits of cheap slave labor which was outsourced decades ago, and our politics towards multipolarity reflects that. That being said, I trust Alexander Mercouris' analysis that Russia simply put up a friendly face for decades while it was too weak to confront the West and when strong strategic allies like China had yet to emerge.Subaru S#
All good points, I will add that since 1985, Russia has existed as a pluralist society. Since the moment Gorbachev appeared and later Yeltsin, there have always been voices on every point of the spectrum, from the most pacifist, liberal and pro-Western, to those who are the most extreme, hawkish and paranoid. Every one of those voices be they in the form of a political party or party representative, journalist or private citizen has the right to be heard and their voices carry weight and influence. President Putin is powerful but he is not the Czar of Russia, nor for that matter does he hold the most hardline views in Russia. As has been mentioned on this channel and elsewhere many times, the President is a moderate compared to other individuals he is close to. The inherent problem in any truly pluralist society is that voices on either extreme of the spectrum tend to present not only as irreconcilable with each other, but with the existing order generally. What Alexander Mercouris described is simply the common sense approach of diplomats in Russia's situation. In my opinion, Russia has no desire to confront the West - even from a position of strength. Please don't misunderstand my use of the word "faith" in my essay. It's not so much about Russia "trusting" the West in its diplomatic stance, as much as it is proceeding from the view that Russian and Western nations share common human values. The end of the era I am suggesting Lavrov has announced is much more subtle and much more important than anything to do with trust. What is in your view more cutting and impactful in a relationship conversation - when someone says "I don't trust you any more", or when they say "I have finally come to the conclusion that we have nothing in common." ?Ingolf
I agree that Russia has no desire, nor should it, to confront the West. And that the country's politics is the sum total of the political opinions of its citizens. I think the most fruitful approach for any statesman when conducting diplomacy is to understand the nature of his counterpart, to gauge whether it is looking for a negative-sum (warfare, conquest, etc.) or a positive-sum relationship. And it's just an undeniable fact that the West has been pursuing almost exclusively negative-sum arrangements for the past 500 years, from the colonial past all the way to the present, which is why Gorbachev's and Putin's initial expextation of a different relation is so baffling. The West doesn't engage in real diplomacy, in the sense of being morally bound to an agreement it has signed in good faith, and that's why you can only have cold transactionalism (i.e. maximum deterrence) with it. The same way you'd deter a hungry predator eyeing you as its next meal. Russia and its resources has long been designated as the next economic meal for the West, at least since Hitler sought Lebensraum in the East in 1941.Jack Ponomarev
Two observations: 1) Gorbachev sitting in a dacha in a babushka sweater while society crumbles; 2) Gorbachev going on speaking gigs earning the same as Western ex-presidents and politicians. “Gorbachev, Yeltsin, sitting in a tree, Sawing off the branches supporting society.” — Vare J.Moonpack