Specks of spit from three Vladimirs

Some Ukrainian media recently published a lecture on the causes and effects of the Russia-Ukraine war, which a well-known Russian journalist, Vladimir Pozner, had delivered at a Moscow French-cuisine restaurant. As it follows from lengthy newspaper comments, the lecturer in general condemns the Russian policy but, at the same time, makes two attempts to somewhat extenuate the Russian aggression. Pozner claims that if NATO had dissolved itself, as the Warsaw Pact did after the collapse of the USSR, there would be peace and sheer bliss in the whole post-Soviet space. He also says the Americans were ready, as the Russians were, to unleash World War Three during the Cuban missile crisis. In other words, Vladimir Putin was terrified, as John Kennedy was, to see foreign missiles in front of his window and, therefore, reached out for arms. This cock-and-bull story was told by Vladimir, but not Putin, a person allowed to host an oppositional program on a popular Russian channel. As we like to spread the echoes of such programs nationwide, I will let myself make some commentaries.

Firstly, about NATO which we need more than the European Union… It is not widely known that the Soviet Union was actively trying to get into this respected organization as long ago as 1954. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov himself filed an application and pressed for it in Berlin – the same Molotov whose grandson is now cursing NATO up hill and down dale at Russia’s State Duma. But the application was turned down. General and Lord Hastings Ismay, the then Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, figuratively explained the reason why. “The Soviet request to join NATO is like an unrepentant burglar requesting to join the police force,” he said. He meant not only human rights violations and Nazi-type prison camps that still existed in the USSR. The lord was hinting at the savage blockade, which the Soviet troops had imposed on West Berlin in 1948 to provoke revolts of the hungry, as well as at inhumane treatment of foreign and Soviet prisoners of war, and many other far-from-peaceful features of the eastern defeaters of Nazism. In the 1950s, the Europeans’ affection for their liberators gave way to a growing fear – this is why many were not exactly rushing to admit the Russians to the defense alliance. In response, the USSR established a military bloc of its own, which comprised seven countries. Just born in 1955, the Warsaw Pact bared its teeth in Hungary in 1956 and then in other countries. In 2005 the Warsaw-based Institute of National Memory made public some Warsaw Pact archival documents. Among them was a secret plan, “In Seven Days to the River Rhine,” the project of a blitzkrieg-style seizure of Austria, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, with the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and many other in no way peaceful intentions. When the Warsaw Pact was breaking up, I happened to visit some headquarters of the Soviet troops stationed in Eastern Europe and see that preemptive strikes against NATO countries were planned down to the minutest detail.

Fortunately, the Warsaw Pact has ceased to exist. Although the treaty had been extended for 20 years in 1984, it went defunct in 1991 for well-known reasons. Why then NATO, a bloc established to ensure European security well before the Warsaw Pact appeared, should dissolve itself only because one of the dangers has vanished by the logic of Europe’s historical development?

Before 1991, the Warsaw Pact showed its perfidious nature in many countries, gaining the sustainable reputation of an aggressor in 1968. The NATO bloc first participated in an armed conflict in 1992, when it was supposedly drawn into the Balkan war. Therefore, the claim of the two Vladimirs, Pozner and Putin, about a Western threat is of a purely hypothetic nature. NATO soldiers have never trampled on the former USSR’s lands, while Soviet troops have left their marks in Europe whenever they encountered no resistance.

Now about Kennedy and Putin, as far as Cuba and Crimea are concerned. If Washington were pondering now on how to build a bridge over Florida Bay to supply the “Island of Freedom” with food, I would agree to Comrade Pozner’s inferences. But the nature and lessons of the Cuban missile crisis are far from any island-related matters. Cuba was an occasion for confrontation between the superpowers whose leaders showed sanity at the brink of an abyss. John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev removed their missiles from Turkey and Cuba, respectively, for which senile hawks in Washington and young eaglets in the Kremlin still do not like them. Time has shown that peace on the Caribbean islands promoted prosperous tourism and boosted the sailing sport among the Cubans. Everybody sails to America. A huge and powerful state has resigned itself to having a tiny island with a different system of values next to its shores. If Russia showed the same kind of tolerance towards its neighbors, not only Russians, but also citizens of other countries would be sailing to it across the Baltic, Black, Caspian, and other seas in search of happiness. But as people are not sailing but, on the contrary, emigrating, is it worthwhile to compare the “Island of Freedom” with the ethnic homeland of Crimean Tatars and the Ukrainian holiday center which Russia has turned into a peninsula of occupation and violence.

This question is to Vladimir, but not Putin, who, of course, knows the right answer but applies the Soviet political pattern to NATO and the US, obeying the rules of Russian TV propaganda. Here is his own explanation of his appearance on the air: “Of course, I may be shown around as an example: look, we really have the freedom of speech. But I may be not – let’s live and see. And, of course, I am aware of playing a not so simple role because one can say that I am misleading – look, Pozner is here, so things are not bad. Let us see. It is an unimportant thing, and time will show.” (http://novaukraina.org/news/ urn:news:14F007D)

Russian pop and talk-show stars like announcing loudly about departure from the stage and then staying behind on the latter for decades. Suffice it to recall Iosif Kobzon who took a series of farewell tours across the then USSR. Pozner has also said goodbye to audiences more than once, projecting the image of a regime opponent. However, an unknown force lighted his star every time on the channels which do not admit oppositionists even as lighting technicians. The one who knows about this force is a third Vladimir – Mayakovsky. It is he who formulated – a hundred years ago – the idea of why celestial bodies come up before our eyes.

Listen,

If stars are lit

It means – there is someone who needs it.

It means – someone wants them to be,

That someone deems those specks of spit magnificent.

If this is the case, it was decided long ago and not only by one of the Vladimirs whether or not Pozner can show up on Soviet-Russian TV. The magnificent specks of spit on the air will tell us who exactly did it.