As the war in the Middle East intensifies, public attention has shifted from the Russo-Ukrainian conflict to the extent that some days the subject does not make mention either in the print news or in the radio and television reporting. This development is unfortunate in that the Ukrainian people are in a struggle for existence, one which, if they lose, will set in motion even greater schemes for Russian aggrandizement.
The war in Ukraine, the first land war in Europe since the conclusion of World War II, has potentially drastic consequences should Russia win its war of conquest. In 1955, the Warsaw Pact united all the countries that Stalin had grabbed after the end of the Second World War in a move to show a united force to counter the Western countries allied in NATO. The Soviet Union, then under the leadership of N. S. Khrushchev, established the pact as a threat to the security of the Western nations, should they contemplate making hostile moves.
With the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, the pact fell apart as well, leaving Mother Russia in a fractured state, both economically and militarily. Of all the satellite, or “client,” states of the Russian bear, Ukraine was the most important. Its agriculturally rich plains were the “Breadbasket of the Soviet Union,” and its rare earth deposits supported the regime’s far-flung military ambitions.
Putin’s invasion is an initial step in his geopolitical goal of reassembling the nations lost to Russia in 1991 under a new Russian Empire. As one who spent his early career as a K.G.B. officer, Putin is not a stranger to the methods of imposing of brutality to achieve his aims. His current attempt at regathering is the latest version of the application of the traditional ideology that claims that Moscow is the Third Rome, a force destined to rule over other peoples, especially other Slavs.
M III R, as the myth is denoted popularly, has been for the past five centuries the abiding mentality of the Russian state, throughout the Tsarist period, into the Soviet years, and now in its post-Soviet metamorphosis.
In essence, during the Tsarist times, M III R held that Moscow was the true, pure and unadulterated form of Orthodox Christianity, because the Muscovite church had not joined in the movement for Christian unity formulated at the Council of Florence in 1415, which meeting was designed to present a united front against the impending Turkish threat to the West. As such, it was the obligation of Moscow to bring others into its fold.
The Marxist-Leninist contribution to the myth came in 1917 with the fall of the Tsarist monarchy, to be replaced by the Marxist form of Bolshevism. Stripped of its religious identity, in its new secular form, its underlying psychology remained. V. I. Lenin saw Russia as the “iskra,” or spark, to detonate the world revolution as envisioned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
The implementation of that goal was interrupted by the Russian Civil War, followed by the Russo-Polish War of 1920, in which the Red Army’s march into Poland en route to Germany and Western Europe, ended in its defeat by the army of the newly formed Polish state. Known as “The Miracle of the Vistula,” the battle ended with the Polish army forcing the Russian remnants to turn and flee back to Mother Russia. The ensuing territorial condition remained until Josef Stalin’s successful land grab after the Second World War.
Stated simply, Putin is carrying forward the mantles of Lenin and Stalin in seeking to expand Russian control over the neighboring territory of Ukraine. If successful, this action will serve only as the beginning of the building of a “Greater Russia,” a new empire in which Moscow the Third Rome in its secular phase will come to assume once again its self-seen role as the “Mother of the Slavs,” and ultimately of those peoples beyond them as well.
