Window on Eurasia

“The West” as an Idea is Anti-European and Anti-Russian, Kremlin Advisor Says

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 18, 2006 – The idea of the West as a group of countries with common cultural roots and a common approach to international affairs ceased to be relevant with the end of the Cold War, and any use of the term now is inherently anti-European and anti-Russian as well, according to a senior Kremlin advisor.

In remarks to a conference last week on Russia’s relations with the West, Gleb Pavlovskiy, the president of the Effective Politics Foundation and an advisor to President Vladimir Putin, said that the idea of “the West” is only relevant for an understanding of the Cold War
[http://kreml.org/opinions/123383131?mode=print].

Like various Soviet institutions including the Sovnarkhoz system – an
economic arrangement in the USSR --he insisted, “the West was an
American-European Sovnarkhoz which was administered from Washington”
and which helped the U.S. to keep the countries of Western Europe in
line during the conflict with the Soviet Union.

But he said, “the creation of Russia and the EU have made the
existence of the West simply not a real thing.” Those developments
showed that “the West was Europe during an abnormal situation” and
that today the term is simply “a figure of speech,” employed by
those in the U.S. who want to subordinate Europe and isolate Russia.

For a brief period after September 11, 2001, Pavlovskiy continued,
“the shadow of the West returned briefly,” but it remained in play
only until the start of the war in Iraq which demonstrated that
whatever the Americans may have hoped, the kind of West they dominated earlier no longer exists.

Many analysts in Europe, the Kremlin advisor said, have long viewed
“the West as an anti-European concept,” but it is “anti-Russian”
as well because it intereference with the rise of “European
values,” which are being “thought out anew in Russia and in the European
Union.”

Pavlovskiy then extended his argument to suggest that many who use the
term the West today as well as many who do not do so are behind what he
called “the threat of the formation of a world-wide anti-Russian
consensus.” Such “a threat,” he continued, represents “a danger
for us,” one that is “in fact inter-civilizational.”

And in response, he suggested, Russians “have the right to react
nervously to attempts to conduct worldwide anti-Russian propaganda just
as Jews react to anti-Semitic propaganda, because potentially this
[anti-Russian] propaganda is an attempt to portray the Russians as
being guilty for all problems on earth.”

On the one hand, Pavlovskiy’s remarks last week are simply the latest
version of earlier efforts by Moscow, both Soviet and Russian, to
divide Europe and the United States in order to weaken Atlatnic institutions
like NATO and and thus to strengthen Moscow’s hand there.

On the other hand, the very extravagance of Pavlovskiy’s remarks,
comments that might strike many as almost paranoid, provides a glimpse
into a kind of Russian thinking at the highest levels that does not
bode well for relations between Moscow, Europe, and the United States in the
future, however many smiles there were at the G-8 sessions.

But perhaps the best commentary on Pavlovskiy’s ideas came from
another Russian participant in the very meeting the Kremlin advisor
spoke to, a session that pointedly did not include anyone from Western
Europe or the United States. It was provided by Vladimir Poznoer, a
leading television personality in Moscow.

He noted that many Russians regularly insist that they understand
people in Europe and the United States but that people in Europe and the
United States do not understand Russia.

In fact, the television commentator said, “we do not understand them
very well, and they do not understand us very well either.”

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