By JIM GENARO

As he steps back from his position as Russian president, Vladimir Putin leaves a legacy that shares much with the totalitarian leaders of the former Soviet Union and czars, according to Dr. David Dorondo.

An associate professor of history at Western Carolina University, Dorondo addressed the World Affairs Council of Western North Carolina at UNC Asheville’s Owen Conference Center last Monday.

About 40 people attended his talk, titled “Russia and Putin.” The lecture was the last in the group’s 2008 Great Decisions program.

Marc Mullinax introduced Dorondo as a member of WCU’s history department since 1987, specializing in modern Germany. However, he also has an interest in and knowledge of Russian history.

Dorondo began his talk by quipping that “I was absolutely thrilled that the Russian elections were arranged specifically for this talk.”

More seriously, he noted that “it’s a very interesting arrangement” whereby Vladimir Putin handpicked Dmitry Medvedev as his successor as president, with Putin agreeing to serve as prime minister — but continuing to call the shots.

Medvedev, with no serious opposition, received more than 70 percent of voters’ support, with a turnout of over 64 percent of registered voters.

Dorondo also noted that “what you’ll hear today is a historian’s look at these events, rather than a political scientist’s look.”

He noted that today’s events feature “a recent re-emergence of Russia as a power factor on the Eurasian land mass.” This, Dorondo said, is in keeping with trends in Russian history.

He cited examples of the Russian Revolution and Josef Stalin’s consolidation of power, as brief moments when Russia retreated from the world scene.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, a brief period of somewhat relaxed relations between the Soviet Union and the West ensued.

However, this easing of tensions soon gave way to what Dorondo called “arguably the most dangerous period of the Cold War,” as Nikita Khrushchev consolidated his power and went on to engage in a series of diplomatic engagements that many within his own party felt were reckless.

The crushing of the Hungarian government in 1956 after a nationwide uprising against Soviet rule was folllowed by a diplomatic crisis in Berlin in 1958 and the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

The last of these was “at least as much an existential crisis for East Germany as it was a crisis between the Soviet Union and the West,” Dorondo said.

Then, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 pushed the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war with the United States.

By that time the Communist Party leadership, “who valued stability above all else,” was becoming fed up with Khrushchev’s “diplomatically reckless” tactics and a number of failed domestic policies, Dorondo noted. In 1964, he was forced to resign.

Leonid Brezhnev, a protégé of Khruschev’s, succeeded him and ruled the party until his death in 1982.
This period represented the rise of a Soviet “gerontology — rule by the aging leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution,” Dorondo said.

During that period, the Soviet Union built up its military capacity, especially its strategic rocket force, which “achieved parity” with that of the U.S., he noted.

However, the Soviet Union also began increasing its exports of oil and natural gas to Europe during this time.

The Soviet 1979 invasion and war with Afghanistan, which some have termed the “Soviet Union’s Vietnam,” weakened it militarily while leading to the “rise of militant Ilsam within the Soviet Union,” Dorondo told the audience.

When Mikael Gorbachev took power in 1985, his charisma and popularity “sent shockwaves through the Soviet Union,” he noted.

Gorbachev had “the personality of a rock star,” Dorondo said. “This was enough for many in Western Europe to think things within the Soviet government had fundamentally changed.”

That assumption may have been mistaken, Dorondo suggested, but within a decade, conditions within the country did change dramatically.

A “rapid decomposition of the Soviet Union” took place in the 1990s, he noted, following the election of Boris Yeltsin in 1991 — the first democratically elected leader of Russia.

This period saw the rise of an oligarchy within Russia composed of “nouveau-riche capitalists, who in many cases were former Communist bosses,” Dorondo said.

But by 1998, many of the reforms that had been passed had left Russians deeply unsatisfied.

“Putin rode to power on a wave of discontentment,” Dorondo said. At the heart of this discontentment was a feeling that Russia had been profoundly humiliated and that it had lost its standing and influence in the world.

Particularly distressing to Russia was the admission of several former Soviet Bloc nations to the North Atlantic Treaty Organizations, including Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

Furthermore, allegations by the European Union and the U.S. that Russia has been backsliding away from democratic reforms have exacerbated tensions, Dorondo said.

For instance, Russia has been criticized for abolishing the election of all regional governors, who now are appointed by Moscow.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and Western Europe have stuggled with how to deal with Russia — particularly whether to act multilaterally or unilaterally, Dorondo noted.

One the one hand, multilateral actions tend to have broader popular support and tend less to promote sentiments within Russia that the West is its enemy.

On the other hand, Dorondo said, multilateralism “moves only as fast as its slowest member.”

Consensus building can sometimes take longer than a situation warrants.

Dorondo then took questions from the audience.

A man noted that Dorondo had “not made much distinction between the U.S. approach and the European approach.” He asked whether Dorondo saw a “divergence of policy” taking place between the U.S. and the E.U.

Dorondo replied that there has been a rift, which has been growing since 1990. Prior to that time, when Europe was more clearly divided into East and West, Western Europe had to act in accord with the U.S., as the two found a common enemy in the Soviet Union. However, an increasingly bullish and unilateralist foreign policy by the U.S. has prompted many European to develop separate foreign policy strategies.

Furthermore, the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. was “a horribly contentious issue in Europe,” which promoted anti-American sentiment among many, he said.

“Do you see the Chinese and Russia as competing for influence among the central Asian sates or do you see them as allies working to create a buffer against American hegemony?” a man asked.

Dorondo responded that China and Russia are allied out of necessity, but that the two are traditional rivals. They have come together to strengthen their positions against the U.S., but at the same time, “both need the U.S. because we’re their best markets,” he noted.

Furthermore, Russia is largely dependent on Western Europe for its exports of natural resources. More than half of Russia;s exports are oil and natural gas, of which Western Europe buys about half.

A woman asked what the prospects are for a democratic government in Russia.

Dorondo replied that he has been reluctant to make predictions since a time when he predicted to a classroom that the Berlin Wall would not be toppled in his lifetime — 18 months before the wall fell.
Nonetheless, he noted that the Russian government has much in common with the German Democratic Republic’s self-described “democratic centralism.”

Under that system, East Germany’s national affairs were run by a powerful, unchallenged Communist party. However, the country had opposition parties and media and elections were held for regional leaders who had no power over national affairs.

Today’s Russia “looks an awful lot to me like a non-communist version” of that system, he said.