By SAMUEL KILSZTAJN*

Europe continues to struggle with the Russian ghost that defeated Napoleon and never embraced the French Revolution and Western democracy. Russia's political organization and institutions are a mystery and a challenge for Europe.

In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev's report "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", known as the "Secret Report (Speech)," which highlighted the purge and extermination of thousands of communist militants and demystified Joseph Stalin's role during World War II, affected diplomatic relations between China and the Soviet Union, which deteriorated categorically in 1964.

In the midst of the Cold War, the United States watched with joy the Sino-Soviet split, which weakened its then number one enemy, the Iron Curtain formed by Russia, the other republics of the Soviet Union and the satellite states of Europe that made up the Warsaw Pact, in addition to neighboring Cuba.

The United States' rapprochement with China began in 1968, Republican President Richard Nixon visited the country (1972), the Vietnam War ended (1975) and diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China were formally established in 1979.

Russia started the Perestroika in 1986 and the member countries of the Warsaw Pact began to abandon communism in 1989, the year in which the Berlin Wall was torn down. In 1991 the Communist Party was abolished, the Soviet Union was dissolved and the Cold War ended. Despite the Gulf War, the world envisioned and celebrated new times of peace and universal harmony. Nelson Mandela left prison to become president of South Africa. How ironic that today we are nostalgic for the times of the Cold War!

At the turn of the 2017th century into the 1st century, the traditional Chinese Empire, which had been dominated by the West during the Opium Wars in the mid-XNUMXth century, rose again to become a major world power, using the West's own weapons, the world of goods and progress. The open intensification of trade relations between the United States and China began during the Donald Trump administration in XNUMX and China is currently the United States' number one enemy.

In his second term, Donald Trump is determined to appease the conflict between Europe and Russia, in order to distance the Russians from the Chinese, the same tactic used 60 years ago, with powers and alliances reversed. And, by all indications, the current disarticulation between the United States and Europe favors China; if it runs, it will catch it, if it stays, it will eat it.

The Russian Ghost – Step by Step

The reaction of the aristocracy of Continental Europe led Napoleon Bonaparte to export the French Revolution, and during the Napoleonic Era, the ideas of revolution invaded the continent. But in 1812, Alexander I defeated the Grande Armée of Napoleon, keeping the Russian Empire resistant to the liberal conquests that dominated Continental Europe.

Em War and peace, Leo Tolstoy reconstructed the historiography of the Russian Campaign and the chance that governed the stubborn resistance of the Russian people and army (Western people, however, attribute the victory to General Frost, the harsh Russian winter). Russia defeated Napoleon in 1812 and had to wait another century to abolish its absolute monarchy.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, civil war took hold of the former Empire. Along with Ukraine and Belarus, Poland was part of the Tsarist Empire. The Bolsheviks understood that socialism restricted to archaic Russia was unviable and wanted to reach Warsaw to join the German revolutionary movement (Poland was strategically located between the Soviet Union and Germany). Vladimir Lenin's goal was to reach Berlin, Paris and London.

And Europe, aligned, committed itself to erecting a “cordon sanitaire” to stop the Soviet advance on Poland. Charles De Gaulle participated in the French Military Mission in Poland and won the highest Polish military decoration, the Virtuti Militari. The Bolsheviks were unable to cross Poland to reach Berlin; and Germany took it upon itself to suppress its socialists, eliminating leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919.

After the death of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin championed the doctrine of “socialism in one country” and the internationalist Leon Trotsky was removed from the Communist Party. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Nazi Germany began to consider Poland. To contain German aspirations, London, Paris and Moscow tried but failed to reach an agreement, because Poland refused to allow Soviet troops to enter its territory.

Finally, on August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a Non-Aggression Pact, with secret protocols determining the partition of Poland. Thus, after two decades of independence, Poland was once again divided between Russia and the former Prussia and Austria, then unified as the Third Reich.

After occupying Continental Europe, in June 1941, Nazi Germany decided to invade the Soviet Union. The bloody Battle of Stalingrad, in which more than a million Russians perished, is considered the turning point of the Third Reich, which was designed to last a millennium. And the Poles had to rely on their number one enemy to free them from German occupation. In 1, after the Second World War, victorious Imperial Soviet Russia (again, General Frost, from the Westerners' point of view) occupied all the countries of Eastern Europe and half of Germany, installed the communists in power in its own image, transformed all its territories into satellite states and formed the Warsaw Pact.

With the imminent dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, NATO and the USSR agreed to keep the member countries of the Pact neutral. However, all former Warsaw Pact members were incorporated into NATO because, according to NATO, the agreement had been signed with the USSR, which had dissolved in 1991. It was then agreed between NATO and Russia that Belarus and Ukraine would constitute the new neutral region. In the Crimean Crisis of 2014, Ukraine and Russia have come into conflict and the clash continues in the ongoing war in Ukraine.

European authorities were surprised by the US policy announced by Donald Trump. The Russian ghost is running wild and seems to have knocked on Napoleon's door in 1812. Just like the Bolsheviks in 1917 and Stalin in 1945, once again, the Russians are coming. Volodymyr Zelensky was initially outraged; Emmanuel Macron, for his part, was panicked by the Russian threat to France and Europe and made his nuclear arsenal available.

Europe continues to struggle with the Russian ghost that defeated Napoleon and never joined the French Revolution and Western democracy. Russia's political organization and institutions have been a mystery and a challenge for Europe, since the empire of the czars, through the Bolsheviks and now with Putin in power. It is worth reading the humorous outburst by Russian Marxist sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, editor-in-chief of the online magazine Rabkor.ur, sent from prison, where he is currently serving a five-year sentence.

*Samuel Kilsztajn is a full professor of political economy at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of From scientific socialism to utopian socialism [amz.run/7C8V].

References

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ACDoxjj9WQ] is a comedy directed by Norman Jewison, released in 1966, at the height of the Cold War. A Soviet submarine runs aground on an island in Massachusetts. The submarine's crew disembarks to ask for help, but the locals panic, believing they are being invaded by the Soviet Union. The film was mentioned in the United States Congress and shown at the Kremlin. It is worth watching, it is hilarious (I must say, however, that in 1967, I simply hated the film – we were in the middle of the Military Dictatorship, I was 15 years old, I was preparing for political activism and I did not find it funny at all).

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