Russia in Global Affairs

However radical or “totalitarian” Soviet Russia was, it struck a powerful chord within the societies of not only the West, but also the East and the global South, because it stood for universal ideas.

The battleground reality reveals there is a contradiction between the existential exigencies of the Russian state and nation on the one hand, and the existing structures and power-relations on the other.

The deepest lesson of Yugoslavia is that it foredoomed itself to defeat by the shift in its own thinking. That shift has also taken place in Russia. Avoidance of a Yugoslav outcome and a Serbian fate will require the reversal of that colossal self-defeating error in Serbian thinking.  

Fidel Castro consistently refused to regard Gorbachev even in retrospect as anything but sincere, though profoundly in error. Fidel told the Sandinista Commander Tomas Borge, that the end of the Soviet Union was a case of “suicide, not homicide”. Mikhail Gorbachev was a tender-minded tragic figure who by his inexplicable confusion and conversion, assisted that suicide of a superpower.

Russia should embark upon a grand reconversion and reconfiguration which begins with a retrieval of its own history and identity. Retrieval does not mean a return to that identity; it means reclaiming it and returning it to its rightful place in one’s overall identity, writes Dayan Jayatilleka.

The West is waging a political-military war of total or absolute character against Russia. What Russia faces now is the second edition, the 21st-century edition of the Great Patriotic War, writes Dayan Jayatilleka.

The struggle over Russia’s destiny in the world, seen as the struggle for Russia’s soul between Westernizers and Easternizers – or Westernizers, Easternizers, and Eurasianizers – is an old trope.