Arrived in March in Lithuania, I made an extraordinary discovery: the salt and matches were gone from the shops. For a week I had to ask the neighbors for salt, then he reappeared. More or less at the same time Aleksandr Lukashenko, spreading his arms in mock astonishment, told on TV that queues of Lithuanian citizens had formed on the borders of Belarus, and that he had given orders to supply the shops near the border with additional quantities of salt. Furthermore, iodine had disappeared from Lithuanian pharmacies: it was said that it had to be taken in case of radiation, half an hour before the atomic attack and then for the next two days.
The Baltic countries experienced the month of April in relative tranquility, with new panic attacks on the eve of May 9, when – or so it was said – Putin would have celebrated the day of victory with a general mobilization of the Russians, or with an attack nuclear power to European cities. In Riga, provocations were expected. In Germany there was talk of restoring public air raid shelters from the times of the Second World War, and the Cold War. In Europe and the US, a real bunker boom is underway: the demand for private shelters, the cost of which varies from $ 50,000 to $ 1 million, has increased dozens of times.
We can smile at the paranoia of more susceptible Europeans and Americans, but the war in Ukraine has shaken the world like never before in the memory of two generations: neither Iraq nor Yugoslavia have had such a profound impact on the system. US President Joe Biden is accusing Russia of causing record inflation of the last 40 years, while Putin is pleased that “inflation now bears my name, even if we have nothing to do with it”. But the most dramatic events are those taking place on the food markets: the world risks a real catastrophe. The war, and the Russian blockade of Ukrainian ports, mean that millions of tons of grain will remain in the fields, or will rot in silos, condemning tens of millions of Asians and Africans to starvation. Historian Timothy Snyder recalls that the idea of controlling Ukrainian wheat is not new, both Stalin and Hitler had thought of it: the first created the Holodomor famine in Ukraine, which killed almost 4 million people, the second wanted to send grain to Germany to starve millions of Soviets. Putin is using the same tactic today, blackmailing the world and counting on an invasion of Europe by refugees from North Africa and the Middle East, the main consumers of Ukrainian wheat.
Even if the bombs explode and kill in Ukraine, in fact a world war is now underway on our planet, exactly as the Kremlin had planned it, obsessed with delusions about the Third World War. In this war, Russia has neither a superior military force (the “second army in the world” is bogged down in the Donbass, where it fights for months to conquer small iron hubs.viari), neither of an economic potential, nor of significant human, technological and media resources. However, it controls an important potential: fear, and the ability to influence global processes far beyond one’s borders. The modern world is so complex that it allows one problem to produce unpredictable cascading effects: last year, the disaster of the container ship Ever Given, which ran aground for six days in a shoal of the Suez Canal, did enormous damage to the whole. the global economy. Russia today is that ship, it is the virus inserted into global networks to damage them or even send them haywire.
The fear trade has been a Russian specialty since the dawn of time. There is an apocryphal phrase, now attributed to Tsar Nicholas I, now to Alexander III, who would have written in their own hand on the draft of a geography manual for cadets: «Russia is not an industrial, agricultural or mercantile power; Russia is a military power, and her destiny is to be a threat to the whole world around us ». For centuries, Russia has burdened Europe from the East as heir to the Asian Horde, it is in the wars with it that the European identity was formed. The philosopher Boris Groys instead defined Russia as the “subconscious of the West”, where the West places its repressed memories and fears.
At the same time, the Russia proposed to the world other images: the mystical one, the “spirituality”, of the feminine and the enigmatic Russian soul. It is no coincidence that in many James Bond films a Russian spy, treacherous and seductive, comes to challenge him. Finally, Russia has also produced a unique model of modernization: the cultural explosion of the Russian avant-garde and the political explosion of the revolution have produced an energy that has propelled the country for almost a century.
For many countries, the Soviet modernization project has remained a model and a (much mythologized) alternative to liberal capitalism, the basis of Soviet “soft power”. Towards 1980, however, after the Soviet tanks in Budapest and Prague, after the invasion of Afghanistan and martial law in Poland, the Soviet alternative was tarnished, and in the arsenal of the superpower there was only the old and tested war threat kit. Contemporary Russia is too weak to build a new world, but it is dangerous enough and integrated into global networks to destroy the old one, threatening it with cataclysms and instability, with new wars and the nuclear apocalypse.
The Kremlin does not hide its goal: maintaining a “certain tension” in the West is “necessary for as long as possible,” Putin said at the end of 2021. Former Kremlin ideologue Vyacheslav Surkov produced a long essay in which he proposed to Russia to start “exporting chaos”. Russia, in fact, produces threats and capitalizes them, operating on the fertile ground of fear historically cultivated in the Western subconscious. This export of fear has a very precise definition: it is called terrorism, that is the action of influencing public opinion and institutions through violence and intimidation. Today Russia is dedicated, as a state, to military, food, migratory, informational, chemical (suffice it to recall the poisonings of Litvinenko, Skripal and Navalny) and nuclear terrorism, at least at the level of blackmail.
Terrorism is usually the weapon of the weak – the Palestinians, the Islamists, the extreme left – who seek to blow up large systems with asymmetrical methods of fighting an overwhelming enemy. It is the same tactic of Putin, which thus compensates for the evident Russian economic, technological and diplomatic weakness. By starting his reign as the “president of modernization”, who had to adapt his country to the needs of globalization, paradoxically he succeeded: twenty years later, Russia is globalized as a terrorist and a major threat to the contemporary world order. Global security cannot be guaranteed without a cardinal solution to the “Russia problem”. This in turn will require coordination of international efforts unprecedented since World War II, but for now the West has neither a clear plan of how to get out of the crisis (if we don’t count the cowardly fear of “not humiliating Putin” and the childish desire to “restore everything as it was before”, nor of politicians and institutions ready to take on this task. This means that chaos will only expand, its price will rise, and the Kremlin will continue to ride this murky wave. the world war will go on, from the bombing of Kiev to the executions in Donetsk, and from starvation in Africa to the bunkers in Bavaria, with no end in sight.
* Professor of the Free University
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