Matthew Omolesky: History Returns to the Caucasus
[Matthew Omolesky recently finished a researcher-in-residency at the Istitut za Civilizacijo in Kulturo in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and is presently completing his first book, Striving Towards the Past, a study of the uses of history in contemporary Central and Eastern European politics.]
In his 1953 collection of political essays, The Captive Mind, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz described a visit by a Soviet journalist to Silesia in the aftermath of World War II. Mistaken for an Englishman, the journalist "was embraced on the street by a man crying: 'The English have come.'" The apparatchik wryly responded: "That's just how it was in the Ukraine in 1919." According to Milosz,
This recurrence of sterile hopes amused [the journalist] and he was flattered to be the representative of a country ruled according to infallible predictions; for nation after nation had indeed become part of its empire, according to schedule. I am not sure that there wasn't in his smile something of the compassionate superiority that a housewife feels for a mouse caught in her trap.
There is a Russian word for this sort of attitude: naglost'. A blend of condescension, arrogance, and brazenness, naglost' has always been associated with political power in Russia, and lately has been a defining characteristic of its revanchist foreign policy with respect to the democratic states of the post-Soviet "near abroad." The gas shut-offs in Ukraine, the bronze soldier mayhem in Estonia, and the combative rhetoric from the Kremlin concerning NATO Central European missile defense initiatives were relatively irenic, however, when compared with the unfolding crisis in the Georgian region of South Ossetia. As the young democracy of Georgia grapples with its gigantic adversary, with the world looking on ineffectually, we can see Robert Kagan's notion of an "end of dreams" and a "return of history" in action in the volatile region of the Caucasus...
Read entire article at American Spectator
In his 1953 collection of political essays, The Captive Mind, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz described a visit by a Soviet journalist to Silesia in the aftermath of World War II. Mistaken for an Englishman, the journalist "was embraced on the street by a man crying: 'The English have come.'" The apparatchik wryly responded: "That's just how it was in the Ukraine in 1919." According to Milosz,
This recurrence of sterile hopes amused [the journalist] and he was flattered to be the representative of a country ruled according to infallible predictions; for nation after nation had indeed become part of its empire, according to schedule. I am not sure that there wasn't in his smile something of the compassionate superiority that a housewife feels for a mouse caught in her trap.
There is a Russian word for this sort of attitude: naglost'. A blend of condescension, arrogance, and brazenness, naglost' has always been associated with political power in Russia, and lately has been a defining characteristic of its revanchist foreign policy with respect to the democratic states of the post-Soviet "near abroad." The gas shut-offs in Ukraine, the bronze soldier mayhem in Estonia, and the combative rhetoric from the Kremlin concerning NATO Central European missile defense initiatives were relatively irenic, however, when compared with the unfolding crisis in the Georgian region of South Ossetia. As the young democracy of Georgia grapples with its gigantic adversary, with the world looking on ineffectually, we can see Robert Kagan's notion of an "end of dreams" and a "return of history" in action in the volatile region of the Caucasus...