Russia and Syria have a deep and long, political marriage that is one
of necessity, one of connivance at times, but also a historical
relationship based on a respect that is bonded by both adversity and
creative, political struggle. Before, I attempt to describe or make what
I hope is a serious commentary on the relationship between Russia and
Syria in the present time that we live in, and which involves the civil
war in Syria, itself, I would like to quote the Roman historian Polybius
who noted about history and empires and their causes both in peace and
war that “For it is history alone which without causing us harm enables
us to judge what is the best course in any situation or circumstance.”
We should remember these wise words on history and the best course to
follow for empire or nation-states in the modern world. Also, let us
take a calm look of factual clarity at the history of these two
countries whose political and social fates are wedded now for better or
for worse in a time of war against terrorism and the interest of certain
nation-states who seek out world hegemon, regardless of the cost of
humanity in terms of lives lost. The historical relationship between the
nation-state of Russia, formally the Soviet Union, and the nation-state
of Syria is one of genuine collaboration through periods of internal,
Syrian political crises and regional conflicts within the Middle East.
Three coup d’ etat occurred during the period 1949-1953, until the
Ba’ath came to power in Syria in 1954, which was keenly observed by the
political and military leadership in the Soviet Union, and was only
enhanced by the Suez Crises in 1956 with the Tripartite Aggression by
Israel, France and Britain. Although there have been cordial culture
interests between the Russian and Syrian peoples, it is has always been a
friendship forged by pragmatic needs, both being economic and military
in terms of mutual interests.
Within the current civil war in Syria it should be historically
understood that Russia, by its very history with the Syrian Government
and the Syrian people, have a political and moral obligation to help
defend the legitimate interests of Syria in its struggle against modern
terrorists such as ISIS or nation-states that seek to overthrow the
current president of Syria and create a hegemony that would only enhance
more dangerous instability in the Middle East. War being what it is
among modern nation-states creates a dangerous mass of miscalculations
and contradictions among the Western powers which seek to impose their
will upon the Syrian state in terms of commerce, the selling of arms and
regional control over a population whose aspirations are not
considered. On the other side, there are those nation-states like
Russian, Syria, Iran and Iraq, for instance, who are more interested in
promoting the independent economic, social and cultural interests of
their nation-states which is part of the process towards a more
pragmatic form of international order throughout the world. Therefore,
the profound historical civil war that is taking place in Syria it is in
fact a dialectical part of that process towards self-determination and
independent national liberation movements among all nations in the
Middle East.
As ancient Roman had deep political and military interests in Greater
Syria so in fact does modern Russia would have a historical political,
economic and cultural ties with modern Syria. In the modernist since, it
has been the Soviet and Russian experience to seek out international
norms regarding the balance of power in terms of global politics and the
need that causes for military intervention. With this historical
perception in mind, especially since the time of Lenin when
internationalism and the thrust for revolutionary social change was part
of Soviet-Russian foreign policy, there was a fundamental socialist and
pragmatic view to the expansionism of International law and that ran
counter to the Western perception of assessing and then forcing a
hegemonic military paradigm as would be advocated by Western
nation-states, with the United States being Its nominal leader for such
political behavior. That these two different views on the accepted means
of considering world political crises as they arose, would create not
only a so-called “Cold War”, but would also be the demarcation line of
rancor, distrust and proxy wars between the two views regarding the
approach the use of military force. This international rivalry became a
bien établi behavior regarding diplomacy and war. With these
un-varnished perceptions of the inevitable harsh approach to both
political and military friction between these two opposing camps, it was
only natural that the Soviet Union and then post-Soviet Russia would
readjust her strategic, not to mention her tactical approaches, towards
confronting the Western powers. As the historian, Roy Allison would
admit in his work Russia, the West, and Military Intervention “After the
collapse of Soviet superpower did Russian positions on these issues
continue to reverberate in the international community? Russia above all
has continued to impact on global rule-making through its ‘top table’
presence as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Russia has
maintained a presence also in key groupings for regional crises
management, such as the contact Group for the Middle East, the
Four-Party talks on the Korean Peninsula and the Six Power talks on the
Iranian nuclear programme”. It is interesting to note here in the long
pageantry of human history that during the time of Soviet rule in
Russia, there was never an invasion by a Soviet army into the Western
regions of Europe. There was an occupation of Soviet troops in Hungry
and Czechoslovakia due to the uprising of dissatisfied elements of the
inteligencia, workers and communist party officials who naively thought
that certain Western powers would support their idealism for democratic
liberalism, but such dreams or fantasies where to be short live, for the
armies of Western Europe or the United States did not come to their
aid. Therefore during the middle period of the twentieth century, the
Western European bourgeois powers with its ally the United States,
although interested and preparing for world hegemony as their imperial
quest, were still using rhetoric and subtle propaganda techniques in
their own going ‘cold war’ with Russia and her allies. As with the Peace
of Nicias, when Athens along with her allies of Greek city-states and
Sparta, with her Lachmannian confederacy of allies, signed a peace
treaty in 421 BC which terminated the first half of the Peloponnesian
War, so to was there an undeclared truce between the Western capitalist
powers and the Soviet Union and her satellite socialist allies of
Eastern Europe after the end of World War II, known to the Soviet people
as the Great Patriotic War. It was during this time of a cold peace in
which proxy wars and wars of economic subversion were in acted by both
parties, that the Soviet Union took a deep interest in its recognition
of Syria as rising political power in the Middle East.
There were many stages in which Russia took a political interest in
the Middle East, including Syria or the Levant area (territory know in
the modern world as Syria and Lebanon). These interest were both
territorial and political in their conceptions by the Russian monocracy,
then the Soviet Union and the present Russian Federation. This process
of political engagement and cultural recognition between both Russia and
Syria were then of a dialectical political process that has lasted
through the twenty-first century, and therefore such engagment
diplomatique et polticalical are complex and even subtle in nature. What
is seemingly viewed through a historical timeline of events between two
countries does not account for the covert, even justifiable
Machiavellian and warm interactions that two countries with various and
even different political interests, will have in an international
relationship. The historian, Rami Ginat, gives in the beginning of his
work “Syria and Doctrine of Arab Neutralism” a very seemingly view of
how the Russian State has viewed the Middle East through the last three
centuries by stating thus:
The Middle East has always attracted the attention of Russia in
its various historical phrases—Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, or the
present Russian Federation, because the region is the southern gateway
to Russia. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the expansion of
Tsarist Russia southward asresult of colonial conflict with the Ottoman
Empire and Persia.… Following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Russia
opted out of the war [World War I] … In 1919 Lenin declared “pre-War
frontiers will be respected, no Turkish territory will be given to
Armenia, the Dardanelles will remain Turkish and Constantinople will
remain the capital of the Muslim world”.
As we see the long standing interests with Russia and the Middle East
are one of a long history, only the British and French have such a long
memory of history regarding their own relationship with the Middle
East, while the United States has a short history with the Middle East
at best, however one that has long history of spreading its war machine
in Tanium in the that region of the world in modern times.
To understand the interest that the Soviet Union had with the
emerging nation state of Syria after World War II, it is important to
know how Stalin viewed such a regional interest outside the natural
territory of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Although this
essay does include primary Russian diplomatic resources on the eventual
political alignment between Russia and Syria in the modern world, I will
attempt to draw some conjectures on the rapprochement of economic and
culture détente between the two countries. During these early years, it
was understood through diplomatic signals and diplomatic embassy
exchanges among the various parties who took an interest in Syria’s
future, that Stalin, the leader of the USSR sought out a revolutionary
approach to the Middle East, and therefore was more interested in the
engagment of communist revolutions being nurtured, so it was only
natural that he would be concern about the build-up and sponsorship of
Middle Eastern communist parties that wanted socialist governments in
that region of the world. It has been argued or mention by such Middle
Eastern scholars like Ginat that there was no major diplomatic changes
to the way the Soviet Union viewed its policy to the Middle East until
the death of Stalin. It can be argued that with the onset of the Second
World War, Stalin certainly had his intelligence agents in the field in
the Middle East, especially in Egypt and Syria, not to mention Iraq.
Already as early as 1944, the Syrian government had imitated a serious
interest in having direct diplomatic contacts with USSR, during a time,
when such a move could have had dire consequences had the course of the
war for the Allies and the Soviet Union had turned into defeat on the
battlefield. Fortunately such was not the case, and Syrian diplomats
were able to meet the first Soviet minster to Egypt, Nikolai Novikov,
and although the meeting did not turn out well for the Syrian
delegation, it was the first crucial step towards the official
rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the nation-state of Syria.
After a series of through the summer of 1944, Novikov was informed from
the Soviet Government that as of 19 July, that diplomatic relations with
Syria had been attain, and that a Soviet diplomatic mission would open
in Damascus of that year. It was on July 31, that the Soviet Union and
Syria created formal diplomatic relations, but it was not until February
10, 1946 that official diplomatic missions between the two countries
was cemented with diplomatic protocols. Thus we see that the road to
diplomatic recognition between the two counties was not hurried nor
seamless, as a world war had brought them together in the struggle for
independence on the side of Syria, and the fight to the death against
Nazi fascism by the Soviet Union. What should also be noted and not
overlooked is how Stalin would play a major role in such a creation of
healthier relationships between those countries of the Middle East and
the Soviet Union. As Ginat commented his book on the subject, and it
should be understood that he was not a communist was the measure of
Soviet foreign change, when he wrote:
Soviet policymakers appealed to Middle East nationalist groups to
concentrate on the task of putting an end to Western influence in the
region. To achieve that end, the Soviets nurtured relations with
governments that were already pursuing anti-Western policies. … Stalin
begin to follow the line of realpolitik in his international Affairs
program. Foreign policy was, first and foremost, based on Utilitarian
considerations derived from the USSSR’s growing interests in certain
parts of the world… what mattered more to him [Stalin] was that they
pursued anti-Western policies.
In other words, Stalin was keenly intelligent to purse a more
pragmatic course of diplomatic relationships with Middle Eastern
countries, including the Middle East to protect not only the frontiers
of the Soviet Union, but also to consolidate the victories already
achieve on the battlefield. When a leader combines military achievements
with diplomatic accords that bring about regional and global stability,
then that leader is remembered for such a rare talent in history. In
the twenty-first century, such talent by a world statesman is not be
seen as yet. However, Vladimir Putin took a page from Stalin regarding
knowing when to pursue war, when it came to directing the Russian Air
Forces in their engagment with targeting Daesh, also known as ISIS, and
the al Nursa Front in Syria, and when to reach out to the diplomatic
table among all the parties involved in a regional conflict, as when
Russia and the United States brokered a truce which took place in
February of 2016 during the Syrian Civil War which had begun on March
15, 2011.
We see, therefore, that from the middle of World War II to the early
years of the twenty-first century, the political historical era which
this author writes about could remind one much like what took place with
imperial Rome and Syria in ancient times. Except both regional forces,
meaning Russia and Syria are neither hegemonic in outlook nor force a
direct submissive behavior from their allies like those Roman leaders
who used their Roman legions unsparingly against foe and friend alike,
and those Syrian governors of Greater Syria who submitted to Roman rule
without question. Modern Russia who is wedded to the revolutionary
Soviet Union, is a nation that ultimately forges peace or is forced to
play a role on the world’s stage in fighting modern fascism and American
imperialism whether they are reluctant or not about their role. Syria
is still going through its birth pangs of being a regional world power
through the process of the classical civil wars that Thucydides and
Tacitus wrote about so boldly.
Within the modern history of the Russian and Syrian alliance, there
have been tensions that have worked themselves out through a pragmatic
understanding, so as to continue the historical process of independence
of not only Syria’s domestic and foreign policy agendas from outside
interference, especially from Western hegemony, but to insure the
security of other Arab countries as well. With this in mind, when it
comes to the reactionary deeds of Daesh, we must understand where the
seed of such a viscous terrorist organization emerged from, that is its’
root of growth. As Yevgeny Primakov, who was not only once the head of
Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, but also was the Foreign Minister
and Prime Minister of Russia, the terrorism that expanded in the Middle
East and spread outside that regions should be understood as such:
But the terror inflicted by both sides in the Middle
East conflict was not the breeding ground for the
international terrorism seen at the end of the twentieth century and the
beginning of the twenty-first. For starters, Middle Eastern terrorism
was by its nature political, not religious.
Primakov’s succinct observation of the core of terrorism not only in
the Middle East, but throughout the world, is a rational and understood
historical understanding of how modern aggression and wars is not one of
a spiritual nature, but conflicting ideologies that emerge from
economic and class contradictions.
But Primakov goes further in his analysis of the “war against
terrorism” in the twenty-first century by stating emphatically that “The
network known as Al-Qaeda did not arise from the Palestinian movement.
Al-Qaeda was religious extremist catalyst used the United States during
the cold war—with, as it turns out, no thought to the consequences. It
came into being with the aid of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
for the purposes of fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan”. Now, in
the times that I am writing this essay, we are reaping the terrible
violence of the whirl wind we created, which in turn is creating the
implosion of the Western world, including that of the United States as
well.
It is known through various sources that the former USSR did not
pander or always take sides with Syria regarding issues like the Lebanon
civil war or the struggle of various political parties and military
forces that desired to control the Palestinian struggle of statehood. In
fact, it Yuri Andropov, then the general secretary of the Soviet
Communist Party, who in 1983, attempted to bring about a more
conciliatory relationship between Syria and the Palestinian ranks that
were at odds with Syrian leadership regarding the tempestuous leadership
of Arafat within the Palestinian enclave. Therefore, if one attempts to
see the foreign policy of the Soviet and Russia alliance with Syria,
throughout the decades of the modern era, one will notice that there was
always an ebb and flow between the two nation-states. The underlying
destructive force therefore can be seen elsewhere regarding the war in
the Middle East and regional terrorism, in that like the Trotskyites
during and after the Russian revolution, American foreign policy is
mitigated by the various United States presidential regimes, who have a
fanaticism to “export” its American view of democracy into the borders
of nation-states throughout the world. Such a modern American manifest
destiny includes Syria with its historic civil war in our time which
could further enflame other regions of the Middle East or provoke World
War III. It is in Syria that the people will manifest themselves in the
battle against Islamic terrorism, and it is in Syria that the world’s
fate will be decided regarding such a war.
It is with this short paper that I have attempted to show in a subtle
way how history is not created by simply the whims of individuals or
capriciousness of nation-states without consequences. If we do not
understand the nature of alliances which are like a find and subtle
thread from the beginning to the end, then we cannot create a political
course of action that brings about a period of peace, but will only
bring on the holocaust of war.
