Ukraine's foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, said yesterday to Radio NV (Ukraine) that whoever replaces Vladimir Putin will not "necessarily" be an improvement for Volodymyr Zelensky — even a leader who frees imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
According to Klimkin, "There’s a game around Navalny. I don't rule out that this is a game played between certain Kremlin's towers – to pull out Navalny at some point and say: 'You see, we're much better now. Let's quickly be friends with us, remove sanctions from us.'"
Russia would then proceed to behave as it always has. And so, reasoned Klimkin, "A change of government in Russia will not necessarily work in Ukraine's favor." What will work in Ukraine's favor is countering Putin — or whomever — "from a position of strength.... If he's not able to achieve this, it opens Pandora's box, which destabilizes at least Europe, and possibly much of the world."
Interesting is that Klimkin's remarks somewhat mirror those of the extraordinary Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), although the diplomat's words are more guarded. Conrad suffered under Russian rule as a boy, and in adult essays and novels he never let himself, or his readers, forget it. Sounding much like Klimkin in 1918, just after the Bolshevik Revolution, he wrote: "The great thing is to keep the Russian infection, its decomposing power, from the social organism of the rest of the world.”
In a 1905 essay, Conrad argued "that Russia was a barbaric Asiatic despotism,“ observes his biographer, Jeffrey Meyers. In Conrad's words: "This dreaded and strange apparition, bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung over with holy images; that something not of this world, partaking of a ravenous ghoul still faces us with its old stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance already heaving in the blood-soaked ground with the first stirrings of a resurrection."
In a 1907 novel: "The scrupulous and just, the noble, humane and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement — but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment — often of remorse."
A 1917 novel: “Once Tartar and Turkish, and now even worse, because arising no longer from the mere savagery of nomad races, but from an enormous seething mass of sheer moral corruption — generating violence of a more purposeful sort."
And late in life, Conrad wrote: "I spring from an oppressed race where oppression was not a matter of history but a crushing fact in the daily life of all individuals, made still more bitter by declared hatred and contempt. The Russian mentality and their emotionalism have always been repugnant to me."
Someday, a Ukrainian novelist, perhaps one as gifted as Joseph Conrad, will write tales of his or her upbringing during the Russia-Ukraine war and reflect on the invading regime's hatred and contempt, its oppression and decomposing power born of the same "old stupidity" of Conrad's century. And in the 22nd-century novelist's eyes, Russia still will not have changed from its "barbaric Asiatic despotism."