Oleg Yuryev — Those who planned, organized and implemented Maidan hardly thought that things would come to a bloody civil war, floods of refugees and balancing on the brink of war with Russia. However, even when the events followed this scenario, neither the Kiev authorities, nor their Western patrons stopped their activities. This is convincing evidence of the new strategy that the West has launched in regard to Russia. This strategy is aimed at forcing Russia to follow in the wake of the policy pursued by the United States and its partners with a view to establishing a unipolar world.
Reasons for the new confrontation between Russia and the West
There is more to it than US domination in the global arena. We all feel that the world order established after World War II has stopped ensuring the stability, predictability and security of the course of history. The feeling of mounting chaos in global development became particularly pronounced after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global crisis of 2008. The unipolar world project is the brainchild of the United States. Its goal is to get history under control by consolidating the domination of the United States and its allies in all spheres of human life.
Outstanding Russian thinker Alexander Zinoviev was the first to prove that this option existed objectively after the Soviet Union's disintegration. At the same time, he admitted that it was not inevitable. Control over history may be achieved via an alternative global project. Russia is the only country that is fully aware of its mission and has sufficient resources to wreck the unipolar world project. This is why the events in Ukraine merely became a trigger of the confrontation between Russia and the West that had been brewing for a fairly long time. I believe that President Vladimir Putin's speech at the security conference in Munich in February 2007 was its first public manifestation.
Now this process is unfolding as political confrontation and an information war. Most probably, sooner or later, it will become less acute and some agreements concerning the events in and around Ukraine will be reached with the United States and the West in general. However, I believe that relations between Russia and the West will never be completely peaceful. They are too far apart in their views on the present and the future and the choice of basic goals and values.
Intermediate results of the information war
Today, we can sum up the results of the half-year information war over Ukraine. We have scored successes in winning the support of Russian society for the policy pursued by President Putin and the Government as a whole. Sociological polls speak volumes. Russian society was nowhere near such consolidation during the first Chechen war, for one.
However, we are losing the information war abroad, on the global scene. This is not because we fail to bring our views home to the world public. We are doing this fairly well. But we are far from scoring a strategic victory in this information war. I'm referring to our efforts to win the hearts of the public at large in Ukraine and the West. I attribute this primarily to our failure to create an attractive image of modern Russia abroad.
We have failed to use soft power. Indeed, in the past two decades, we have not achieved success in technological innovation or economic modernization, or approached the living standards of advanced countries. We are still proud of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, space exploration and occasional Nobel and other prizes that are conferred to Russian scientists who, with rare exceptions, live and work abroad.
The information war is targeted at fanning Russophobia, and this is a new and dangerous phenomenon. Indeed, even in the worst years of the Cold War the information war did not slide to the brink of xenophobia when the enemy image is based on ethnic or racial distinctions. Now this is being done in Ukraine with Western blessing. Modern information technology, achievements of psychology, sociology, and neurolinguistics, as well as an appeal to phobias, prejudices, instincts and emotions are making it possible to successfully brainwash a whole nation. Methods of conventional propaganda that appeal to reason and common sense cannot overcome Russophobia because it is rooted in the subconscious. Obviously, we were unprepared for such a turn of events.
Is Russia ready to send its message to the world?
We have also failed to send our message to the world. The ideological and moral depletion of the country has never been so deep since the times of Peter the Great. Relatively recently, we had thinkers of a truly global scale — Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Tyutchev and Nikolai Danilevsky. They were followed by a galaxy of outstanding religious figures. After the 1917 October Revolution, our country started promoting an alternative, communist project of world arrangement that also found response in the world. Today, we are unable to say anything intelligible either to ourselves, or the rest of the world.
President Putin has urged a more intensive search for a national idea, but it will hardly appear in the foreseeable future because such ideas are not invented but are born by a country's life. For the time being, nothing is happening in this life in Russia, nothing that could be perceived by the majority of Russian society as a breakthrough to a fundamentally new level of development.
Nonetheless, we have the main thing — sometimes a conscious but most often intuitive — a feeling of raison d'etre. This is our primordial Russian striving for harmonious life when it is not limited to material well-being or daily comfort. Western nations have largely lost this feeling. I do not want to offend or humiliate them by saying this. They have simply chosen a different path of development than Russia. I am not referring to the recovery of ideas or the practice of real socialism that was embodied by the USSR. The Soviet time and realities are gone forever, but the ideals that have always been shared by Russia and its people are still there.
Some people may consider loyalty to these values as a sign of backwardness, but for most people in Russia life becomes pointless without them. This is how the matters stand for the time being — Russia and the West are two global poles. Rudyard Kipling wrote: "Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet…" True, later on he admitted that this could happen under certain circumstances.
As for Russia and the West, I think this may happen only if the West is ready to communicate with a view to developing dialogue, understanding and equitable and mutually beneficial cooperation. Right now, the West is not disposed toward this and, hence, the information war between it and Russia is for the long haul. It will not always be as tough as now. Our relations will fluctuate from a Cold War of different intensity to modern versions of détente that will rarely develop into restricted cooperation. But this will still be a war and we should not have any illusions on this score. However, a war of ideas, a Cold War is still better than a war of armies, a hot war.
Oleg Yuryev is a member of Rossiya Segodnya's Zinoviev Club
