What would Solzhenitsyn have thought of the current, escalating conflict between Georgia and Russia? I ask the question after a weekend spent reading and mulling the consequences of what's looking to be an ever-more-alarming skirmish. Observers have been struggling to find historical precedents for the invasion, in an attempt to provide some perspective. For example, in a remarkable op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili (pictured above) compares the invasion to Afganistan in 1979 or the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. In an equally impressive recap of the history of this conflict, James Traub in yesterday's New York Times makes a more chilling comparison: Citing the conventional widsom in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, Traub compares Putin's invasion of Georgia to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938.
Regardless of precedent, Russia's aggression has provided a portal into the Kremlin's power dynamics. Foreign policy is supposed to be Russian President Dmitri Medvedev's territory. But it was Putin who parachuted into North Ossetia over the weekend. it's impossible to conclude that anyone else is manipulating the Russian military's puppet strings. Taken in sum with TNK-BP and other non-democratic, anti-free market developments, Russia's invasion of Georgian territory, and the attacks on the cities of Gori and Tbilisi, are disturbing indications that Europe may once again be home to a fascist dictatorship.
Would Solzhenitsyn have agreed? The great author died the first weekend of August. The following weekend saw the long-simmering antipathy between Putin's Russia and Saakashvili's Georgia explode like a north Toronto propane storage facility. For all of Solzhenitsyn's enthusiasm for democracy, he also was an enthusiastic Slavophile, one who derided Gorbachev and Yelstin but regarded Putin with comparative approval. Possibly, Solzhenitsyn would have approved of the invasions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, justifying them as simple protections of Russian interests. Again possibly, he may even have justified Russia's bombings of Gori and Tbilisi as further protectionism. (This was, after all, a man so hard-nosed he criticized the American pullout of Vietnam in the early '70s for the weakness it displayed to the world.)
And that is, perhaps, the most troubling aspect of this slow-motion calamity. Slavophiles like Solzhenitsyn are disturbingly willing to neglect democratic precepts in their single-minded quest to reassert Russia's superpower status. Brash aggression plays better in Moscow compared to the slower, painstaking democracy that seems best situated to solve this problem. The situation does not bode well for other areas where Russia believes its interests are in danger: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, for example, as well as the Ukraine. Unfortunately, this one seems likely to get worse before it gets better.
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