MOSCOW. Feb 15 (Interfax) - Modern Russia is pro-peace but cannot live inside the borders established in 1918, following the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, former Russian presidential aide Vladislav Surkov said.
"What else should be done when it is cramped, bored and feels awkward? ... It's unthinkable for Russia to stay inside the borders of the shameful treaty [of Brest-Litovsk]. We are pro-peace. Of course. But not for a shameful one. We are for the right one," Surkov wrote in an article entitled "Vague Future of the Shameful Peace" and published on the Aktualnye Kommentarii web portal on Tuesday.
"A historic (and somewhat hysterical) meeting of the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks Party" took place in 1918, Surkov said. "It decided to make peace with Germany. This peace, known as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was given another, more precise name - shameful - by the opposition media (which was still in existence at the time)," Surkov said.
The treaty led to large territorial losses of Russia, Surkov said. "The treaty was indeed humiliating. According to its terms, Russia dropped claims for huge territories of the Baltic countries, Belarus and Ukraine it used to own. The western border was pushed far to the East, and the country found itself within the boundaries of the pre-Peter or even pre-Romanov epoch. It could not be more shameful than that," he said.
"Yet geopolitical processes are slow, and their results remained buried under piles of overwhelming events for a long time. The collapse of Russia, which started in the 17th - 18th centuries and seemed to be stopped by the Communist state at the cost of colossal sacrifice, did not actually stop. The great, all-mighty Soviet Union turned out to be not a fortress but sort of a Chernobyl sarcophagus, inside which fission, decomposition and alienation reactions continued," he said.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia returned to the western border of February-March 1918, Surkov said. "In the end, a comparison of the modern map of the European part of our country and the map endorsed by the notorious Treaty of Brest-Litovsk will not reveal many differences. Amazingly, the western border of modern Russia practically coincides with the boundary cowardly accepted by the Bolsheviks in 1918 after the German ultimatum," Surkov said.
"It looks like many years later Russia is pushed back into the borders of the shameful peace. It has not lost a war. It has not been downed by a revolution. A ridiculous perestroika, a murky glasnost were enough for the Soviet empire to come apart at the seams. This means a fatal vulnerability was in the system," he said.
"What's next? Clearly, there will be no silence. There is a lot of geopolitics ahead. Both practical and applied, or maybe even contact," Surkov said.