Fear exports

Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian grain exports means millions of tons of grain will rot in grain elevators or remain unharvested, dooming millions of people in Africa and Asia to famine. The idea that controlling Ukrainian grain can change the world is not new. Both Stalin and Hitler wished to do so, Timothy Snyder, a historian, says. Stalin’s collectivised agriculture caused The Holodomor that killed about four million Ukrainians, and Hitler wished to redirect Ukrainian grain from the Soviet Union to Germany, in the hope of starving millions of Soviet citizens.

Putin’s hunger plan is also meant to generate a stream of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East, areas usually fed by Ukraine. This would create instability in the EU, Snyder says. Using migrants as a weapon against Europe was tested by Lukashenka, Putin’s ally, last year.

Although the shells are currently killing people in Ukraine only, a full-scale world war is already ongoing. Such war was most likely planned by the Kremlin before and is very similar to the WW3 described in Mikhail Yuryev’s nonsense alternate history novel called The Third Empire. In this war, Russia has neither dominant military power (its “world’s second strongest army” has been stuck in Donbas fighting for small settlements for months) nor economic potential, let alone human, technological or IT resources. It has, however, one valuable asset called fear which helps it influence the global processes far away from its borders. The modern world is so complex that a malfunction somewhere in a chain might lead to unpredictable cascade effects. Ever Given, a huge container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal last year and caused heavy losses to the world’s economy is a perfect example. Today’s Russia is very similar to that container ship. It is a virus planted inside the global trade networks, capable of damaging or even destroying them.

II.

Fear exports has been Russia’s specialisation for centuries. There is an apocryphal quote attributed to either Emperor Nicolas I of Russia or his grandson Emperor Alexander III. The quote says: “Russia is not an industrial, agricultural or trade country. It is a military country, and its role is to be a menace to the rest of the world”.

I did not manage to find the original source behind this quote, but even if it is a legend, it is a perfect illustration of Russia’s place on the geographical and ideological map of the world. Russia has been impeding over Europe from the East as the Golden Horde’s successor for centuries and has helped Europe form its identity through warfare. Iver B. Neumann, a Norwegian political scientist, says Russia and Turkey are Europe’s “constitutive Other.” Boris Groys, a Russian-German philosopher, determines Russia as “the West’s unconscious” and says Russia is where the West puts its hidden memories and irrational fears.

At the same time, Russia has been creating other images for the rest of the world, too, such as those of mysticism, spirituality (its most successful export mythology), femininity and, finally, the concept of “a mysterious Russian soul.” It is no coincidence that many films of the James Bond franchise feature a Russian female spy as Bond’s antagonist, an insidious yet a tempting woman. This stereotype hails back to Ninotchka, a 1939 romantic comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Greta Garbo as Moscow’s special envoy to Paris. And finally, Russia provided another unique image of modernisation in the 20th century: Russia’s avant-garde art and its 1917 October Revolution provided it with both cultural and political energy which helped the country last up until the 1990s.

This alternative, however, became jaded in the 1980s after the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia, declared martial law in Poland and started a catastrophic 10-year-long war against Afghanistan. All this left the country with nothing but the good old set of threats. At that point, the Soviet Union was too rotten and feeble to create new institutions or propose solutions to global problems. It was, however, still a huge and dangerous country with lots of weapons capable of threatening the West with SS-20 missiles, sluggishly fighting colonial wars, or supporting terrorist regimes all over the globe, as well as shooting down passenger aircraft as it did with Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983 or poisoning half of Europe with nuclear radiation as it did in 1986 after the Chernobyl disaster. Today’s Russia finds itself in the same position, being too weak to build the new world but dangerous enough to destroy the old one, threatening it with cataclysms, instability, wars and nuclear strikes.

III.

Russia makes no secret that its goal is to maintain “a certain pressure” upon the West. “We need to keep the pressure as long as we can,” Putin said in late 2021. Vladislav Surkov, The Kremlin’s ideologist, wrote a long essay in November 2021, calling Russia to “export chaos to the world”. What Russia is doing now is creating and profiting off global threats, exploiting the fears set deep withing the West’s unconscious. Exporting fear may be defined as terrorism, i.e., usage of violence and intimidation to influence the public opinion and the world’s bodies of power. Today’s Russia is using all sorts of military, food, migration, information, chemical (remember the poisonings of Litvinenko, Skripal and Navalny) and even nuclear terrorism on the state level.

Terrorism has always been a weapon for the weak, such as islamists or leftists, helping them disrupt huge systems. They apply asymmetrical methods to fight superior enemy forces, use barbarity against ordinary people to frighten the governments and the common folk. Vladimir Putin is using the same tactic in order to compensate for his country’s obvious weakness in terms of economy, technology and foreign policy. He started off as an “innovative president” like Mahathir Mohamad, Tony Blaire or Bill Clinton who all tried to adapt their countries to the globalisation trend in their own way.

Russia’s place on the world map is finally clear. The West used to believe that Russia would remain a peripheral country interested in exchanging its natural resources for consumer goods and containing a potential Eurasian chaos by oppressive policies. This utopia, however, vanished in the 21st century. Russia has transformed into a terrorist blackmailer state and created a stance where even a hypothetical agreement with Putin’s demands would only encourage the Kremlin and stimulate its exports of chaos, fear, and violence. As the Ukraine War is becoming a prolonged conflict, pundits in different countries are discussing what Putin’s next target might be: Georgia, Moldova, Poland, or Lithuania. The world is slowly realising that this war is not a regional conflict on the outskirts of Europe as some Western politicians would rather think, instead, it is the West’s biggest challenge since WW2.

There will be no global security before the “Russian problem” is solved. This will require the world community to coordinate their efforts, same as they did during WW2. There is, unfortunately, no firm plan on how to overcome the crisis, except for a cowardly fear to “humiliate Putin” or a childish desire to “get back to the way things were before.” Moreover, the West lacks politicians of at least Ronald Reagan’s or Margaret Thatcher’s league, let alone the likes of Winston Churchill or Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as institutions capable of completing such mission. This means that Russia’s chaos will expand and cost the world more and more each day as the Kremlin keeps balancing on top of this muddy wave. The world war with its shellings of Kyiv and executions in Donetsk, its famine in Africa and bomb shelters in Bavaria will continue, and there is no end to it in sight.