Ukraine Another Post-War Berlin?
By Sarah Hafeez
27 March, 2014
Countercurrents.org
Though US President Barak Obama had categorically warned Russia against viewing Ukraine as “a cold war chessboard”, Russian Premier Vladimir Putin’s official takeover of Crimea, the south-east of the country this month has anything but validated the metaphor.
Events leading up to the referendum and the takeover of the Crimean peninsula very uncannily in many ways imitate the erstwhile Soviet Union premier Nikita Krushchev’s decision to build the Berlin Wall in 1961 and sealing close the Iron Curtain between the Capitalist and the Communist blocs respectively at the height of the Cold War at the time.
1945 and 1991
At the end of the Second World War, Germany’s economy was, understandably enough, in shambles. People were hit hard by inflation. Almost one-fourth of the German people were homeless, there was acute food shortage and the economic wherewithal of the state had collapsed. In such times, Germany unconditionally surrendered to the four Great Powers. The USSR, the US, the UK and France then divided the country into four mandates, each for theirs to keep in June 1945. Berlin, the German capital, was also divided and portioned off to the four World powers; East Berlin went to the USSR while the other three went to the Western bloc.
At the end of the Cold War, Ukraine was able to wrest itself free from the USSR in 1991 to become a fully independent nation. However, though Ukraine had arguably been one of the more economically stable and financially stronger states of the USSR, after the breakup of the confederation, the country’s economy was hit by a crippling slowdown with figures running into insurmountable five-digit inflation rates. Ukraine lost 60% of its GDP between 1991 and 1999 due to recession.i
It was in this vulnerable situation that the Western-backed International Monetary Fund stepped in, in around 1995, to help Ukraine out of the economic slump it was in. The US, in a way, via the IMF was able to extend dollar imperialism to Ukraine after the Cold War years. In fact, the IMF declares it “also insisted on basic liberalizing measures...[and] creating the foundations of a market economy”ii in the country, something, evidently enough, best favoured to the US and the EU laze faire economic structure.
Similarly, Russia on the other hand has been keeping a hold on the Ukrainian economy through its natural gas supplies to the country since 1991. The gas supplies from Russia are vital to Ukraine’s economy, something Russia not only knows but has been abusing to dictate terms to Ukraine, a former vassal state of the Soviet Union. The recurrent “gas wars” between Russia and Ukraine over the years have come to be external manifestations of Russia’s parrying for power and control with Ukraine against the latter’s autonomy and sovereignty.
Thus, much like the Western bloc and the Soviet Union had moved into and taken control of an economically crippled Berlin in July 1945 on the pretext of helping a war-torn Germany steady itself economically and politically so was it in Ukraine’s case. After the fall of the Soviet Union when Ukraine became an independent nation in 1991, Russia ensured its looming presence with gas supplies (vital to Ukraine’s economy) as one of its most potent weapon and the IMF and World Bank moved in with economic aid as the West’s most potent weapon in Ukraine.
In Ukraine, it ought to be noted that, tensions between the US and Russia were not solely economical, but political as well. The most clinching evidence of the aforesaid is the Orange Revolution of 2004 when the Russian backed Ukrainian premier Victor Yanukovych was ousted by popular uprisings by activists monetarily aided and abetted by the US.iii
1948 and 2006
Then, in Berlin, when France, the UK and the US in 1948 merged their currencies into a unified and stable Deutschmark, Stalin, was left feeling threatened and disturbed. The move threatened to destabilize the economically weaker Soviet-occupied East Berlin as opposed to the more prosperous and stable West Berlin (backed by monetary aid through the US-sponsored Marshall Plan)-something which compelled Stalin to enforce the Berlin Blockade to starve West Berlin off food and supplies.
A similar situation took off early in 2006 when Russia, in order to starve Ukraine off gas, turned the gas taps off over a steep price hike (from $50 to $230 per 1000 cubic meters) which Ukraine refused to accept. Like the Soviet’s move in 1948 to decelerate the spread of the West’s influence over Berlin’s economy, so too in 2006, as Ukraine itself alleged, Russia under premier Medvedev effected the embargo “to punish it[Ukraine] for attempting to withdraw from Moscow's sphere of influence and to strengthen ties with the European Union and NATO”iv.
1961 and 2013
As the plummeting relations between the West and the Soviet Union reached a crescendo by 1961, an adversarial Nikita Krushchev, the then Russian premiere, tempted the Western powers, especially a reluctant and trepid US president Dwight Eisenhower, to an open duel over his demand for the West to end its occupational regime in West Berlin. So goes for the current Russian President Vladimir Putin in tempting the US and the European Union to levy economic embargos and sanctions on Russia while he stepped up military presence in Ukraine to defend the Ukrainian Premier Yanukovych against growing pro-West sentiments November last year.
The Ukrainian crisis had snow-balled into an all-out international face-off between the US and Russia following Yanukovych’s sudden rejection of a trade deal with the EU which would, as Russia saw it, “put the country on track for eventual accession to the EU”v. Krushchev from 1958 to 1961 had been insisting on the Western powers moving out of West Berlin for similar reasons in that a prosperous West Berlin existing as an island of capitalism in an all Communist East Germany threatened to incite a comparatively poorer Soviet-controlled East Berlin into looking westward.
Popular and violent street protests in Euromaidan (which claimed 80 lives) were spear-headed by pro-EU factions in Ukraine. They were angered by Yanukovych’s refusal to partner with the EU in favour of a 15 billion dollar Russian bailout package and a promise of cheaper gas. The violent clashes in the capital Kiev went on for days till Yanukovych was forced to abdicate late February this year in favour of the Opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk who became interim prime minister. Yanukovych, unlike previous Ukrainian premiers, was the only one to have resisted NATO membershipviand checked the forced advances of the military organization with its ever increasing influence in East Europe.
Therefore, driven to a corner, what Krushchev had done when he enforced the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, fencing East Berlin off from the Western half of the city, Putin did in Ukraine. Krushchev, emboldened by the successful takeoff of the Sputnik 1 was embarrassed and threatened by the mass defections of East Berliners to the economically prosperous West Berlin. He therefore ordered the building of the Wall in August 1961 to keep Western “fascists” vii from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state.
Earlier “emboldened”viii by being strong enough to force the US to stall intended military operations on Syrian soil in the event of chemical warfare breaking out in Syria and Russia having successfully hosted last year’s Sochi Winter Olympics last year, Putin was left embarrassed at Yanukovych’s unceremonious ouster from Kiev. In a show of one-upmanship, a peeved Putin went ahead with Russia’s plans to militarily occupy the largely Russian-speaking Crimean peninsula in Ukraine, despite the West warning it against doing so. It then hurriedly called for a referendum in the region, justifying the move as an attempt to protect Russians in Crimea from “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites”.ix This Sunday, Crimea largely (96 per cent of 82 per cent of the population in favour) voted for coming under Russia thus helping Russia cordon Crimea off the Ukrainian mainland and bring it within its folds.
Another post-War Berlin?
Most, and justifiable so, suggest that this cannot really be Cold War 2 in that the face-off between the US and Russia in Ukraine is not a political expression of entrenched ideological binaries as it was in Berlin, the vortex of the Cold War years ago. Russia is not the Communist bloc the USSR had been. But it does merit some thought about the showdown between the two giants in that Ukraine has come to be the logical legatee of the now defunct Soviet Union. Putin has picked up from where Gorbachev was forced to leave off-something clear in his statement made in 2005 before the Grand Kremlin when he said, “the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century” and lamented the fact that “Tens of millions of our [the Russians’] co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory” – something that perhaps most openly foreshadowed the takeover of Crimea nine years laterx.
And the continuing hostilities between US and Russia, especially economic sanctions, today are unarguably moving towards the military intensities of the Cold War years. While most political analysts are likening Putin’s Crimea venture to Hitler’s 1938 Anschluss drive for Sudetenland, Crimea in fact comes eerily close to the Post-Second World War Berlin. And the standoff between the West and the Soviet Union hinged around the Berlin crisis for three decades after. That the Ukraine crisis may head towards a similarly protracted faceoff was given away in Putin’s expressed bitterness, at the Grand Kremlin earlier this month, towards the West who he alleges have “crossed a red line” by “the way it was [is] with the expansion of NATO in the East, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our [Russia’s] borders.”xi
Sarah Hafeez is a post-graduate student of The Asian College of Journalism
i http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2007/02/weodata/weorept.aspx?sy=1992&ey=2008&scsm=1&ssd =1&sort=country&ds=.&br=1&c=926&s=PPPGDP&grp=0&a=&pr1.x=41&pr1.y=2
ii http://www.imf.org/external/np/vc/2002/083102.htm
iii http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa
iv http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4569846.stm
v http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/putin-outbids-eu-with-15-billion-bailout-offer-to-ukraine/article16015367/
vi http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/02/not-too-late-for-ukraine-nato-should-back-off
vii http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/berlin-wall
viii http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mugambi-jouet/sochi-olympics-emboldened_b_4981517.html
ix http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/18/us-ukraine-crisis-putin-coup-idUSBREA2H0RM20140318
x http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/06/john-bolton/did-vladimir-putin-call-breakup-ussr-greatest-geop/
xi http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/world/europe/ukraine.html?hpw&rref=world&_r=0
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