Ukraine conflict
Kremlin Astrology, Containment, Sphere of Influence: Do You Even Understand Cold War?
Vladimir Putin as the highly decorated Soviet leader. The picture is from a 2012 demo in Saint Petersburg.
© Anatoly Maltsev / Picture Alliance
What does the Kremlin want? The West was already asking itself this question during the Cold War. The conflict with Ukraine is washing up problems and vocabulary from times long past. Some news read like 1983 – an overview.
Kremlin astrology used to be a popular discipline among connoisseurs of the Soviet Union. Essentially, it was about decoding the opaque politics of the USSR and drawing conclusions about the current balance of power. For the most part, however, Kremlin astrologers poked around in a fog of propaganda and secrecy, very often with the image in mind of a country that Karl Marx had described 100 years earlier as “backward, sinister and demonic.” The Soviet Union hasn’t existed for 30 years, but the art of reading the Kremlin is in demand again – like so many other terms from the Cold War that have long been part of history.
What does Vladimir Putin want?
Ever since Russia began deploying soldier after soldier on its western border with Ukraine, fear of war has been rampant in the former Soviet republic and in the West. Spellbound, half the world is looking at Moscow and wondering what the president might be planning behind the Kremlin walls. Is Vladimir Putin actually allowing his troops to invade the neighboring country? At the full risk of provoking a completely unnecessary military escalation? Or is he rattling his sabers to emphasize Russia’s role on the world stage? Is it about distracting from inner problems? Or is Putin just igniting the unrest to further split a divided West?
There are probably more answers to these questions than would be desirable for gaining knowledge. The Russia expert Margareta Mommsen therefore misses the Kremlin astrology. “It’s gone out of fashion,” she said in an interview with Deutschlandfunk last summer, but the lack of Russia expertise in Germany is lamentable, according to the political scientist. “It was really extremely unfortunate that after the end of the Cold War the existing research centers were simply decimated too much,” says Mommsen.
Kremlin astrology is a kind of offshoot of “Sovietology”, which also dealt with the interpretation of Soviet behavior. And indirectly laid the foundation for the Cold War – at least in the West. George F. Kennan, former head of planning at the US State Department, wrote the so-called “long telegram” in 1947, in which he outlined the policy of the Soviet Union. He concluded that the Kremlin was “paranoid” and in a kind of perpetual war with the capitalist West. Kennan recommended a “containment policy” towards the USSR, laying the basis for the Truman Doctrine. From this, the USA in turn derived the claim to oppose the spread of communism as a global regulatory power.
Breaking point Ukraine
The breaking point of the “new cold war” is Ukraine. The former Soviet republic has been increasingly orienting itself towards the West and NATO for several years. Also or especially after Russia appropriated Crimea and thereby violated the Budapest Memorandum, among other things. In it, Moscow once pledged to respect the integrity of Ukraine’s borders. For the US and the EU, the country is therefore the outpost of a new containment policy intended to keep the Russians at bay. Moscow sees the sovereign state as a kind of “natural” part of Russia, which in turn is intended to curb Western influence.
In this context, the word “sphere of influence” is often used again. Another term from days gone by. This is essentially due to the encroaching behavior of great powers. In the current conflict in Eastern Europe, Russia sees Ukraine as part of its “sphere of interest” whose fate Moscow wants to (co-)determine. In 1995 Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine’s second president, said: “There are forces in Russia who do not want to understand that Ukraine is a sovereign state. This is the main problem in our relations with Russia.” More than 25 years have passed since then, but apparently not much has changed. Last summer, Vladimir Putin wrote a historical-political essay in which he simply denied Ukraine’s right to exist. The faction of “Putin understanders” in the West also shares the view that Russia must be granted “security interests” in the region.
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However, spheres of influence are not an invention of autocratic states. With the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the United States of that time indirectly declared the American double continent to be their zone of influence. This claim led to the brink of a third world war in 1962, after the Soviet Union wanted to station nuclear missiles in its ally Cuba. However, the then US President John F. Kennedy did not want to allow this in his “backyard”.
“Finlandization” is also one of those words that were pulled out of dusty books. The term is said to have been coined by the former CSU politician Franz-Josef Strauss. This describes a kind of anticipatory obedience on the part of Finland towards the Soviet Union. Finland belonged to the Russian Empire for around 100 years and, after gaining independence and despite being neutral in the alliance, oriented itself very closely to Moscow. Finnish author Sofi Oksanen said in 2014: “Finlandization was about sheer window dressing for the Soviet Union. In fact, Moscow even controlled what was written about the Soviet Union in school textbooks in Finland.” At the time, she also warned against Finnishization of Ukraine.
Who answers the red phone?
Many connections lead to Washington. There is one from Beijing, one from London, one from Paris. But probably the most famous “hot line” led to Moscow via Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki. Or vice versa from the Russian to the American capital. We are talking about the “Red Telephone”, which symbolizes direct communication in an emergency. During the Cold War, it was about nothing less than personal reassurance as to whether the other side actually wanted a nuclear war or whether one was just accidentally breaking out. The Red Telephone was rarely used. Not in 1983, however, when Soviet early warning satellites reported the launch of US ICBMs due to a false alarm. In 2015, the “hot line” between Russia and NATO was reactivated. The reason was the Ukraine crisis.
Sources: Deutschlandfunk, German wave“time“, “Southgerman newspaper“, “FAZ“, IPG JournalDPA, AFP