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Salon版 - 俄罗斯求仁得仁了。
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Cold War Ghosts Haunt East Europe in Moves for Crimea
By Andrea Dudik, Konrad Krasuski and Leon Mangasarian - Mar 3, 2014
Alzbeta Ehrnhofer was a 13-year-old Slovak schoolgirl when the Soviet Army
poured into Czechoslovakia to “restore order” in 1968.
The unfolding crisis in Crimea took her back to the day almost 46 years ago
when tanks rumbled past her house in the southern Slovak town of Filakovo as
neighbors hid from the Russian-led invaders.
“It’s just like it was here in 1968,” she said today about the upheaval
in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic undergoing its second revolution as an
independent nation. “Nothing’s changed. Even the tanks look the same.”
As Ukrainians steel themselves against a full invasion by Russian troops
into Crimea and political leaders across the globe engage in marathon
diplomacy with President Vladimir Putin to quell soldiers and sailors
already there, people in central and eastern Europe say their mistrust of
Russia is as strong as it has ever been.
Czechs and Slovaks, who split peacefully in 1993, “still remember the
Russian invasion of 1968,” Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek said in
a phone interview today. “We all believed that Russia had joined the ranks
of civilized countries, so this is a very rude awakening to see that even
now, in the 21st century, a country with clearly defined borders can have
its territory violated.”
Western Affiliation
Twenty-five years ago, countries stretching from Estonia on the Baltic Sea
to Romania along the Black Sea (BKSA) began breaking from Russia-controlled
communist regimes in favor of liberal democracies and market economies.
Since then, 11 former communist nations are now members of both the European
Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
“The situation evokes certain historical memories we’d hoped had been put
to rest,” said Eugeniusz Smolar, a Warsaw-based foreign policy expert who
once fled communist Poland. “It just happens that this historical memory,
our own feeling of loneliness and abandonment by our allies, in 1939 for
example, all too easily translates into our feelings about Ukraine at the
moment.”
Janusz Czapinski, a professor of social psychology at Warsaw University who
directs Poland’s biggest public opinion survey, said events in Crimea and
the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia aren’t necessarily parallel and warned
about reading too much of the past into the current events.
Past Ghosts
“That was to some degree a family spat within the Warsaw pact,” he said.
“Today is completely different. Poles aren’t terrified by these events.
Perhaps near the eastern border, but that’s because they fear an influx of
refugees, not an invasion.”
Even so, with the added security of being part of the world’s biggest
military and economic alliances, some citizens from Prague to Budapest and
Warsaw still fear the ghosts of the past. For them, the drama playing out in
Ukraine shows that they have lessons the West has yet to listen to.
Russia’s actions are “less of a wake-up call and far more a confirmation
of what they’ve been warning about Putin for the past 10 years,” Fredrik
Erixon, the director of the European Centre for International Political
Economy in Brussels, said today in a phone interview. “Too many western
European countries, ranging from Germany to Luxembourg, chose to ignore and
play down their fears. The Poles, the Balts and Czechs are now saying ‘I
told you so.’ ”
Russian Investments
For most Europeans, those concerns faded in the generation since Russia
pulled back from its former satellite region as it invested billions of
dollars to reestablish itself as an economic might across Europe.
Russia offered Ukrainians $15 billion in aid in December as deadly protests
that led to the ouster of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych began.
It also has a $14 billion loan deal with Hungary to expand the country’s
sole nuclear power plant and is bidding to do the same in the Czech Republic
. OAO Lukoil (LKOD) runs filling stations across the region.
In Croatia, Gazprom Neft (GAZ), the oil arm of Russia’s natural gas
exporter, is interested in acquiring Zagreb-based INA Industrija Nafte d.d.
from Mol Nyrt., Budapest-based business newspaper Vilaggazdasag reported on
Feb. 14. Russian tourists to Prague, the richest city in the EU’s former-
communist east, are the second-largest group behind Germans.
Changing Attitudes
To be sure, some local political leaders, such as Hungarian Premier Viktor
Orban and Czech President Milos Zeman have publicly supported Russia’s
increased presence in the region. Zeman, in a Jan. 29 interview, said he
foresaw Russia joining the EU in 30 years.
Even for Zeman, sending in Russian troops was a bridge too wide. Yesterday,
he said closer ties with the EU may be complicated as Russia explains the
need to send troops to the neighboring country as a way to protect the
interests of the pro-Russian population in Crimea, which was annexed to
Ukraine in 1954 by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
“Even though I understand the interests of Crimea’s Russian-speaking
majority, which was annexed to Ukraine by Khrushchev, we have our experience
with the 1968 Russian military invasion,” Zeman told CTK news agency
yesterday. “I believe any military intervention creates a deep fissure that
can’t be mended within a single generation.”
In Budapest yesterday, some Hungarians likened the events in Ukraine to the
1956 revolution that the Soviet Union quelled. Hundreds of residents flocked
to the Russian embassy, lighting candles and using them to form the word,
UKRAINE on the street outside.
Georgian War
“We want this region to be peaceful,” said 78-year-old Sandor Dusnoki, who
said he found himself in the “thick of it” during the revolution and
decries Putin’s efforts to influence the region, especially by military
means. “The last thing I want is any sort of conflict in the region.”
Among others, Ukraine shares borders with Poland, Hungary and Slovakia,
which joined the EU in 2004, and Romania, which entered in 2007.
Putin, who sought and won lawmakers’ approval to use military power in
Ukraine, is already known to use force to gain influence in the “near
abroad,” his term for former Soviet republics.
In 2008, Russia routed Georgia in a five-day war over the separatist region
of South Ossetia, which has since declared its independence from Georgia.
Moldova, on Ukraine’s southwest border, also has a pro-Russian secessionist
region, Transnistria.
Putin’s Realpolitiks
“All Putin cares about is realpolitik and spheres of influence to guarantee
the rights of Russians and bolster his vision of Russia as a global power,
” said Spyros Economides, a senior lecturer in international relations at
the London School of Economics, in a phone interview today. “This isn’t
just the ghost of the Soviet Union coming back, but rather that of Russia
going back hundreds of years when it ruled or influenced the nations
surrounding it. Russia’s conception of itself in the world hasn’t changed.

During the past three months, Polish government officials have played
shuttle diplomacy with increasingly sharp criticism of Putin.
“Events in Crimea are a completely unprovoked, duplicitous armed
intervention against a sovereign state,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw
Sikorski told reporters today. “Neither Poland nor the world can tolerate
this.”
‘Ugly’ Situation
Miroslawa, an 86-year-old Warsaw resident who lived through the destruction
of her home city by Nazi Germany and its political and social domination by
Russians, said she had believed Putin would lead a more tolerant Russia.
“But you see he’s continuing Soviet policy,” she said as she watched a
nest of news trucks parked in front of the prime minister’s office. She
asked not to divulge her last name. “The situation looks ugly.”
Slovak grandmother Ehrnhofer, who now lives in Vienna, can’t help make
comparisons with 1968.
The day the tanks came, she was at the local bake shop trying to buy bread
for her family. The store was already sold out and the baker ordered her to
jump back on her bicycle and ride home. Still, her parents and some
neighbors felt compassion for the soldiers, even as hate for the Soviet
system grew, and fed them scarce bread and water.
“Last night, I was looking around my pantry to see whether I have enough
food,” she said. “It’s a horrible feeling to be living through these
flashbacks again.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Andrea Dudik in Prague at adudik@
bloomberg.net; Konrad Krasuski in Warsaw at k*******[email protected]; Leon
Mangasarian in Berlin at l**********[email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James M. Gomez at jagomez
@bloomberg.net; Wojciech Moskwa at w*****[email protected]
.
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