Chechen rebels claim Russian train bombing that killed 26.
Related: A paper from a neoconservative UK think tank linked from a Russian newswire with the spooky title, “Russia’s domestic Muslim strategy – the lurking threat.”
Criticizing neocon analysts is like shooting fish in a barrel (people of the northern Caucasus have an “inherent, traditional inclination towards long wars in the region…”), but this particular paper has a lot of information about the state of Islam in Russia and the surrounding region, and is provocative in describing Russian elite thinking and doctrine on addressing the growth of Islam and Islamism.
If Russia has an overall strategy vis-à-vis Islam and the Muslim world, it is replete with contradictions and can be understood only within the framework of how Russians see their place in the world now and in the years ahead. There is the constant contradiction between a feeling of worthlessness and the sentiment of superiority, of having a mission to fulfill.
Worthlessness found its classical formulation in Chaadayev’s Philosophical Letters (1836): we had neither a Renaissance nor an Enlightenment, we have contributed nothing to world culture, we have not added a single idea, but we disfigured everything we touched. We belong neither to West nor to East…Chaadayev’s diagnosis has influenced Russian thinking to this day and is frequently quoted.
On the other hand, there is the feeling of superiority, the view of Russia as the Third Rome possessed of a unique mission in the world….Yuri Petukhov, recently deceased, was a widely read science fiction writer. Shortly before his demise he formulated his political views and prophecies in Russkii mirovoi poryadok (The Russian World Order). According to him, all foreigners are Nean-derthals and degenerates (the term appears a thousand times in his book), Europe and America were created by Russians and should be repossessed, all Russian leaders including Lenin and Khrushchev (a weakling who did not dare to go to war over Cuba) were traitors. Only the great Stalin is an exception.
Mitchell 10:11 pm on December 2, 2009 Permalink |
I’ve read Dugin (a neo-Eurasianist described at length in the article), but had never heard of Petukhov, and cannot find anything about him in English. But he has a bio at the Russian Wikipedia, which indicates that his final books were self-published and even banned under anti-extremism laws.
bingregory 11:43 pm on December 2, 2009 Permalink |
Very interesting article on Jadidism, a late 19th early 20th century Central Asian movement, linked in the second OP link: http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1060543.html