RUSSIA'S INSOLUBLE PROBLEM

Whether or not Putin’s invasion of Ukraine ends soon, what is certain to continue is his abiding hatred and mistrust of the United States and other Western powers, which he believes left him no choice but to launch an unprovoked war. These views are shared by the many Russian elites and have been a chief reason for his domestic popularity. Putin and the many officials, elites, and scholars who support him not only don’t want to be part of the West and its postwar liberal value system but believe Russia’s destiny is to be a great-power bulwark against it.

This is an old story. The “conflict” between Russia and NATO is not new. It’s been going on for at least 500 years. “The past is still present” is a good way of understanding why things are as they are now.

Vladimir Putin is not the only Russian who sees the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991 as a monumental catastrophe. In 1999, the year the grandson of the man who was cook to both Lenin and Stalin came to power, three-quarters of Russians regretted the fall of the Soviet Union and its subsequent breakup and wanted Russia to regain the lost territories of the Don Basin in eastern Ukraine, taken from the Cossacks, and the Crimea that was taken from the Ottoman Empire that controlled most of Ukraine, by the armies of Catherine the Great in the 1780s that had been returned to Ukraine by Soviet leader Nikita Kruschchev in 1955.

Prince Grigory Potemkin, Catherine’s lover, had encouraged Catherine to annex Crimea to emulate European powers that, he said, had “distributed among themselves Asia, Africa and America.” The image of Crimea as Russia’s own “Orient” became a durable feature of Russian culture during the 19th century, as seen in popular literary works such as Pushkin’s “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray.”

In Russian history, Ukraine is the foundation stone, from the baptism of Volodymyr The Great, medival ruler of Kyivan Rus in 988 A.D. in the town of Chersonesus, then part of the Byzantine Empire. The Orthodox faith then spread north from Volodymyr’s capital Kyiv to what later became Russia.

In Russian, Volodymyr is Vladimir. Both the president of Ukraine and the president of Russia today are named for their national founder. Both men are playing out a history whose basics have not changed since the day of their mutual namesake.

In Ukrainian history, the Cossacks of the Donbas steppe, who enjoyed significant autonomy in the 17th and 18th centuries and resisted attempts at control from Russia, Poland, and the Ottomans, were the defenders of the peasantry, whose condition of servitude was made worse when Catherine’s Russians took control.

While almost everyone seems to think that the modern day and its events are different from the ages that preceded them, such is never the case. “The past is never dead; it’s not even past,” is true the world over.

The present conflict has been laid by some Western analysts to what they call a “strategic blunder” in the late 1990s of the eastward expansion of NATO. The argument against expansion assumes that if NATO not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be as it is today. But long before there was a NATO, Russia was ruled by autocrats who repressed the Russian people and pursued a militarist foreign policy based on suspicion of foreigners and the West. The Russia of today is not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.

For 500 years, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by ambitions that exceeded the country’s capabilities. Russian expansion began in the 16th century with the reign of Ivan the Terrible, carrying through to the 19th century that saw Russia one-sixth of the earth’s landmass and dominating Eurasia geographically. Yet, despite this size, and despite the achievements of the reign of Peter the Great, then Alexander I’s victory over Napoleon, and then Stalin’s defeat of Hitler, Russia has almost always been a relatively weak great power. Despite its cultural achievements, Russia’s problem has the fact that its capabilities have never matched its aspirations. The West, Europe, has always been more powerful.

In trying to match or at least manage the differential between Russia and the West, Russian leaders have always resorted to coercion. Historically, as seen in the achievements of the three leaders listed above, under such leadership the country has a spurt of economic growth and builds up its military, then it has a long period of stagnation where the problems get worse, with attempts to solve the problems only worsening them. The gulf between Russia and the West widens because the West has the technology, the economic growth, and the stronger military.

The worst part of this dynamic in Russian history is the conflation of the Russian state with a personal ruler. Instead of getting the strong state that they want, they instead get a personalist regime, a dictatorship, which usually becomes a despotism.

Writing in the Guardian, Vladimir Sorokin pointed out that in Russia, power is a pyramid, an order originally built by Ivan the Terrible, maintained through cruelty and subjugation: “The Pyramid of Power poisons the ruler with absolute authority. It shoots archaic, medieval vibrations into the ruler and his retinue.”

Putinism is not the same as Stalinism, which was not the same as Tsarism. But all three share that pyramid of power and its result. Does Putin get input from others? Perhaps. Does he pay attention? We don’t know. Do they bring him information that he doesn’t want to hear? That seems unlikely. Does he think he knows better than everybody else? That seems highly likely. Does he believe his own propaganda or his own conspiratorial view of the world? That also seems likely. Like the Russian leaders that preceded him, he is not getting the full gamut of information, but rather what he wants to hear. This is the problem of despotism. It’s why despotism, or even just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and brittle at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.

Because of the poison of the Pyramid of Power, Putin believed Ukraine is not a real country, that the Ukrainian people are not a real people; that they are one people with the Russians. He believed the Ukrainian government was a pushover. He believed what he was told or wanted to believe that his military had been modernized to the point where it could organize a lightning coup, taking Kyiv in a few days and either installing a puppet government or forcing the current government and President to sign some paperwork.

As with other Russian leaders, he is discovering everything is not as he believed.

For Peter the Great, Alexander I, Josef Stalin, and Vladimir Putin, “The West” that they fear and covet at the same time is everything their system can never be. The West is a series of institutions and values, not a geographical place like Russia is. “Western values” means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and everything else one has never found in Russia.

This is not the first time Russians have made a mistake of this magnitude. In 1979, the Soviet Union did not invade Afghanistan; it did a coup, sending special forces into Kabul to murder the Afghan leadership and installed a puppet, Babrak Karmal, who had been hiding in exile in Czechoslovakia. It was successful because Soviet special forces were really good. Then they decided they might need security for the new regime. They sent in the Army to provide security and ended up with an insurgency and a ten-year war they lost.

Putin’s assumption was that Ukraine could be a successful version of Afghanistan; it wasn’t. It turned out that the Ukrainian people are brave; they are willing to resist and die for their country. Evidently, Putin didn’t believe that. But it turned out “the television President,” Zelensky - who had a 25%t approval rating before the war that was fully deserved, because he couldn’t govern—now has a 91% approval rating. He’s unbelievably brave. While having a TV-production company run a country isn’t a good idea in peacetime, in wartime - when information war is one of your goals - it’s fabulous.

Putin assumed the West would fold, because it was in decline and ran from Afghanistan; he assumed the Ukrainian people were not for real, were not a nation; he assumed Zelensky was just a TV actor, a comedian, a Russian-speaking Jew from Eastern Ukraine; and thus he thought he could take Kyiv in two to four days. But those assumptions were wrong. His biggest surprise was the West. All the talk of how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world , all of that turned out to be bunk. The Ukrainian people’s curage, with the bravery and smarts of the Ukrainian government, embodied in President Zelensky, galvanized the West to remember who it was. That shocked Putin!

And that is his miscalculation. The result of the Pyramid of Power in Russia.

Indeed, Putin may have been preparing for this moment longer than people realize: After he annexed Crimea in 2014, longtime Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov wrote that it would mark “the end of Russia’s epic journey to the West, the cessation of repeated and fruitless attempts to become a part of Western civilization.” Surkov predicted that Russia would exist in geopolitical solitude for at least the next hundred years.

That sounds about right.

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