Germany 1919 – Russia 1991: History Repeating?

As a fairly common saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes a lot. One of these rhymes, and a very significant one, occurred in 1991 with the emergence of the Russian Federation from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In that year, Russia found itself in conditions very similar to those of Germany in 1919, which had just been defeated by the Western alliance in the First World War and severely regulated by the Peace of Versailles. Furthermore, that sort of assonance between the two dates 1991 and 1919 helps to evoke the connection between the two situations and the immediately subsequent developments. We could talk about a new Versailles essentially coming to burden Russia after less than a century.
There are four characteristics of post-war Germany that recur in current post-war Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union proclaimed by Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, in December 1991.
Firstly, the loss of large slices of territory populated by millions of their own citizens, Germans in ’19 and Russians in ’91, who suddenly found themselves outside what they considered their homeland and now subject to the sovereignty of new states that often took discriminatory measures against them. The second of these affinities between post-war Germany and 1990s Russia recurs in the economic life of the two countries. At the time of the surrender, the Reich was already burdened by enormous war expenses financed with loans which the defeat made impossible to honor, starting the dynamics of an inflation that would become galloping and uncontrollable due to the additional burden of the reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. This caused a significant alteration of the very social structure of the Weimar Republic and its status with devastating political effects.
Similarly in Russia the crisis of the productive apparatus and the laborious distribution mechanisms of the communist system, created by Gorbachev’s reforms, caused overwhelming inflation, which at the end of ’91 became hyperinflation reaching 200%. Thus a new class of magnates was created, defined as oligarchs, improvised entrepreneurs but capable of acquiring, thanks to the new imperative of privatisation, with limited financial commitment the control of large state-owned production complexes. In both Germany and Russia the military element showed similar discouragement due to the conditions of a substantial surrender to the adversary without having suffered a real defeat. Gorbachev’s flexibility in the negotiations for the reunification of Germany was also due to concern for the conditions of the servicemen who would have to evacuate their positions and accommodations in East Germany. Unlike what happened in Germany in 1919, however, the major leaders of the Russian military apparatus, despite finding themselves at the top of officers and soldiers in conditions of discomfort and discouragement, did not become a significant part of the political debate of the Russian federation. The Soviet army also became another victim of glasnost. Until perestroika, it had been an institution most securely protected from public scrutiny, not to mention accusations of incompetence, corruption or complicity in the decline of the Soviet economy. Its reputation was firmly founded on the laurels of victory in World War II. By nullifying that propaganda machine, glasnost revealed enormous waste, corruption, inter-ethnic tensions, incompetence and nepotism in the army. But the most significant affinity between the Germany of ’19 and the Russia of ’91 can be seen in the type of observance of the conditions agreed for the exit from the respective “wars”, which, although characterized by a different type of conflict, both had a global dimension. In October 1918, Germany asked for an armistice and the opening of negotiations for a peace based on the fourteen points enunciated by President Wilson in the previous January in a message to the Senate, indicating them as the foundation on which a “just and durable peace”should be built. Those “points” provided for the protection of the peoples involved in the conflict on the basis of the principle of self-determination and a balancing of the interests of the winners with those of the defeated. From the Versailles peace conference, however, very harsh conditions arose for Germany, far removed from Wilson’s points and therefore a peace that would prove to be neither fair, according to widespread opinion even outside Germany itself, much less durable, proving, as Marshal Foch predictably stated, to be nothing more than an armistice for twenty years.
Similarly, the end of the Cold War occurred in successive stages with the opening of the Reagan’s talks with Gorbachev and the signing of the “Eurostrategic” medium-range missile treaty, but the truly conclusive moment, largely ignored by many analyzes and comments, were the Helsinki talks between Bush and Gorbachev in September 1990. On the eve of German reunification and the Gulf War. Talks in which there was a beginning of real synallagma between the two interlocutors with the United States obtaining Russian acceptance of the unification of Germany and the start of Western military operations in the Persian Gulf against the Iraqi forces that occupied Kuwait; the withdrawal of all Soviet forces stationed in eastern Germany and Moscow’s renunciation to consider the Gulf its reserved domain. The compensation for Gorbachev was the start of his most invoked “new international order”, and Bush’s assent to the proposal of his interlocutor to create a “axis” between Russia and the United States on all the most relevant issues of international politics.
By agreeing on the end of the division of Germany, the two leaders liquidated the last legacy of the Second World War, while with the agreement on the axis, prefiguring the renunciation of the frequent recourse to the veto on Security Council resolutions, they restored to the UN the ability to operate effectively as a guarantor of collective security. That axis would receive a first confirmation, unfortunately ephemeral, in the following November at the UN Security Council, with the Soviet consensus on resolution 678 on the Gulf crisis, which hypothesized the use of force to put an end to the occupation of Kuwait. This passage would be defined as “a watershed in history” by Brent Scowcroft in his memoirs, co-written with President Bush. That axis, however, was founded on the principles of that Liberal International Order consolidated in the Western world after the Second World War, progressively extended to developing countries and made its own by Gorbachev with his new thinking. The disappearance of the two authors of this “historical” turning point caused a rapid eclipse of those principles and assurances that Bush had given to Gorbachev The most evident plastic image of the decline of the Helsinki agreements is the reversal of the plane that was taking him to Washington decided by Russian Prime Minister Primakov on 23 March 1999 upon learning, precisely on the plane, that NATO was preparing to begin the bombing of Serbia without the agreement of Russia and without the sanction of the UN Security Council.
But the analogies between the first and the third post-war years do not end here. The progressive enlargement of NATO to the East also evokes the cordon sanitaire built in the twenties around Germany with the creation of the Little Entente and the bilateral alliances of the Central European countries and Poland. All that remains is the hope that the evidence of these affinities will lead us to understand how dangerous the alarmism widespread in the comments of many political and military leaders is and the need for peaceful, non-pacifist, policies to be adopted, which seek the solution of existing problems through the identification of a fair balance of the interests of all the actors in the ongoing disputes. In line with what, based on the latest electoral results, appears to be the orientation of the people undoubtedly much more peaceful than that expressed by their rulers over whom the shadow of the sleepwalking of 1914 seems to be stretching.