There are sound historical reasons why Russia has been wary of the West, but under Putin's direction, the country has become a shrill, paranoid, and destructive dictatorship.
"For Russia’s current leader, who is the embodiment of five centuries of geopolitical realism, the West’s refusal to allow him to dictate the destinies of Russia’s neighbouring states ultimately convinced him that the only way to alleviate his security predicament was by the use of force."
That's ultimately the crux of Russia's security problem: the one thing they haven't tried is co-existing peacefully with the rest of the world instead of trying to dominate their neighbors. The invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 only came about after Russia's failure to control Ukraine via corrupt puppet leaders.
Peaceful coexistence with the neighbours and the rest of the world will evolve over time George. Russia has produced a large diaspora, in search of a freer political and economic life, who retain a deep nostalgia for their homeland. They will have influence.
My German parents were war reparation scientific slaves outside of Moscow for five years after WW2. I was born after their release back to East Berlin; but my sister accompanied them as a young girl and maintains a fond love of Russia, except the politics, though she will defend Putin against my opposing, further west, views. For context, my sister has her eyes wide open. She and my mom were caught trying to escape East Germany. My mom obtained release from incarceration through connections and because she was a valued scientist. My sister was expelled from university where she was studying dentistry. She simply went back in the hope that the bureaucracy would never inform the university. They didn’t.
My wife’s family of German ancestry took up land in Ukraine during Catherine The Great’s reign. It was lost to collectivisation and her grandfather disappeared in the Gulags. Her parents were sent to the Urals and then managed to relocate to Kyrgyzstan, subsequently managing to settle in Germany during the Economic Miracle because in the USSR your birth certificate showed your ethnicity as that of your forefathers. After all the losses, and realism that life in the USSR instilled, my wife maintains a deep love for the society of her youth.
There are many more of those and they won’t be discounted no matter how hard the system tries. The system has a battle that they can’t maintain internally or externally over any length of time.
Putin has a pact. The ordinary people will tolerate his kleptocracy as long as they have stability. If stability vanishes then something will give; but we may not like that either.
Even if one buys the 'justified fears' reading of history, Putin's predilection for, shall we say, 'preventative' aggression makes little sense. The surest defense against potential enemies is to turn them into friends; so a leadership that goes out of its way to turn its country into an international pariah is behaving self-sabotagingly from a security point of view.
Notwithstanding my fervent support of Ukraine, it is refreshing to hear something positive about Russia. May they fall flat on their babushkas in Ukraine.
Thank you for the positivity and fervent support Tom. Kudos on humorously enhancing positivity. We all need relief from the machinations of the world’s current kleptocrats. I got mine by picturing myself falling flat on my grandmother (babushka) and imaging her reaction. It's a softer landing, for me anyways, than having nested matryoshka dolls bone bruising my seventy plus year old disappearing derrière.
There is nothing "quasi" about Putin's fascism. His pretext for invading Eastern Ukraine and Crimea since 2014, that of protecting ethnic Russians from "nazi" Ukrainians, is straight out of Hitler's playbook of absorbing the Sudetenland to protect ethnic Germans and invading Poland for the same purpose. Not to mention Putin's degrading and dismissing Ukrainians using the same terminology as Hitler did for "untermenschen" Slavs.
The best (and most fun) summary of the broader history of Russia's perpetual failure to become a "normal country" was this little book I found; I used to read this woman's blog with my partner (Russian, from Belarus), and we both enjoyed the observations on cultural differences and quirks she offered as an American married to a Russian.
Putin isn't an anomaly; rather, he reflects a stubborn societal norm - a deep cynicism that's (luckily) hard to explain to people used to our relative comfort here, but has (unfortunately) been getting easier for many to understand lately, as I wrote about recently here:
No sadly nothing good will happen in Russia. It is a kleptocracy where the rich take from the poor and it always has been.
That Russia should presume that it can just dictate the destiny of any other country, and that it should, is a sad statement about Russia. The largest country in the world with 4x the population of Canada and the same GDP can not even take care of itself and it's people feels the need to go beat up on some other country.
It's basket case economy should have convinced them they need to maybe take care of things at home but alas the leaders are not that smart and the people very dim witted. They are too used to being told what to do to think for themselves and the leaders too used to being able to beat up on them and the other unfortunates in Chechnya and George. The cost is the blood of Russian youth not to mention the Ukrainians. Of course Vlad does not care. What are Russian youth for if not to pump his glory.
People celebrated the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now they are not so sure. Just dumb.
The political opinions of the west tend to concentrate on the leader but miss the issue that the leader is necessarily a product of the opinions of at least a large segment of the population. Thanks for the deeper perspective!
Further to your observation on Russia as the last of the European empires, there must be something to the fact that Britain, Spain and even France had geographic “space” separating the lost flock, whereas for Russia as a continental empire, its colonies literally form its internal borders, and it is impossible easily to separate them, short of the drastic sort of re-ordering following the Second World War that drew the modern nation-state boundaries of Eastern Europe. Being partly unnatural (eg the German-Polish border precipated mass expulsions) they must be forcefully supervised to keep the peace.
Keeping the peace is the prime objective. Without peace the betterment of the human condition is difficult to efficiently implement via sound policies that probably should include a logical and natural reshaping of borders. Though we must be careful because every reshaping has a knock on effect. The nuclear complication makes every path treacherous. It is the trump card in the actors’ decks. It contributes to Putin being both bold and reticent, and more importantly, obstinate. It does provide time for sanctions to change minds; but those sanctions will undoubtedly require more patience and gumption than they did for South Africa - an apples to oranges comparison but a template nevertheless.
A lot of very intelligent, knowledgeable, contributors, including author Leigh Sarty have laid out the historical context for which I thank everyone. The purpose of history is to learn from the past - keep the good, fix the bad. If we use it to merely justify a forced future we may do a disservice à la Putin.
Putin may actually have more external security with NATO surrounding his western periphery than he is willing to admit. As long as he behaves according to international norms, NATO members will not bother him internally as it is a self-policing defensive alliance. That frees Putin to concentrate on his eastern and internal borders; which will decline in numbers and length as NATO inevitably creeps eastward. I do, and I don’t, hope Putin reads this because he is an enigma to me and may use my view as fuel.
That is in essence the prime objective of NATO. You may be suggesting that we need an AUTO: All Universe Treaty Organization? Evil men will be tactically constrained in either scenario as NATO has all the appearances of a winner, as it gathers flies like sticky paper for all the right democratic reasons, and could evolve into an AUTO.
To better the full human condition we still need peace as the prime objective because the nuclear option is always lurking in the background. As long as evil men have a button to push we may be effectively ostracizing many of their servants, and future innocent nuclear casualties, from democracy.
“...Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”. With true peace we can perhaps better concentrate our limited resources on democracy’s improvement and expansion?
NATO was founded to secure peace in Europe by allying its members in their commitment to democracy, the rule of law, individual liberties and the peaceful resolution of disputes. To give strength to peace as the logical choice of belligerent actors, NATO bound its members to an attack on one being an attack on all.
The historical legacy of wars’ detriments to Europe focused minds theoretically. The more contemporary history of WW1 and WW2, and the exponential growth in destructiveness of modern war motivated theory to defer to practicality. Next, the USSR’s immediate threat was the catalyst that sped up the political and bureaucratic process; but it was not the sole or limiting reason for the founding of NATO.
We can’t take a cavalier historical attitude to MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). We have been on its brink a number of times already. One push of a button, one misstep, can annihilate a lot of history and perhaps all of it. One push of a button can make it completely irrelevant who we descended from.
None of that enshrines that "we have to let them be evil or they'll kill everybody". No correct thinking person or clear thinking proponent of peace would ever condone that. NATO is doing an admirable and Herculean job of tiptoeing around aid to a non-member to stifle evil and lay the groundwork for peace, while incorporating sober cognizance of MAD.
Please be kind enough to consider an expansion to your last sentence Colin: Ordinary Russians are very kind, hospitable and gregarious. It is their system and leadership that makes them pretend, or appear, to be publicly sad in the interests of survival.
Russians, and all survivors of communism and its leftovers, have the most amazing collection of funny, nuanced, jokes that make you roll in the aisle. Jokes are a lingua franca that enables the maintenance of your humanity while accommodating “allowed” expressions of your opposition to a system requiring extraordinary bravery to oppose or criticize too openly or directly.
Richard, you warmed the cockles of my heart by providing the pleasure of Ed West. Many thanks. My son keeps a file of communist era jokes that never lose their therapeutic kindred magic or universal historical lessons.
The top comment on Ed West’s article was written by Richard North: “Great article, but the parallels with today are chilling.” That is chilling!
Gorbachev had a sense of humour which licensed Margaret Thatcher to “... like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.” Volodymyr Zelenskyy is cut from the same cloth of humour. If Putin would see the light of humour in humour we might actually get somewhere; but he duped Angela Merkel, so once KGB always KGB may require us to wait for his successor who is hopefully cut from the Gorbachev - Zelenskyy cloth and isn’t consumed by the system.
"For Russia’s current leader, who is the embodiment of five centuries of geopolitical realism, the West’s refusal to allow him to dictate the destinies of Russia’s neighbouring states ultimately convinced him that the only way to alleviate his security predicament was by the use of force."
That's ultimately the crux of Russia's security problem: the one thing they haven't tried is co-existing peacefully with the rest of the world instead of trying to dominate their neighbors. The invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 only came about after Russia's failure to control Ukraine via corrupt puppet leaders.
Peaceful coexistence with the neighbours and the rest of the world will evolve over time George. Russia has produced a large diaspora, in search of a freer political and economic life, who retain a deep nostalgia for their homeland. They will have influence.
My German parents were war reparation scientific slaves outside of Moscow for five years after WW2. I was born after their release back to East Berlin; but my sister accompanied them as a young girl and maintains a fond love of Russia, except the politics, though she will defend Putin against my opposing, further west, views. For context, my sister has her eyes wide open. She and my mom were caught trying to escape East Germany. My mom obtained release from incarceration through connections and because she was a valued scientist. My sister was expelled from university where she was studying dentistry. She simply went back in the hope that the bureaucracy would never inform the university. They didn’t.
My wife’s family of German ancestry took up land in Ukraine during Catherine The Great’s reign. It was lost to collectivisation and her grandfather disappeared in the Gulags. Her parents were sent to the Urals and then managed to relocate to Kyrgyzstan, subsequently managing to settle in Germany during the Economic Miracle because in the USSR your birth certificate showed your ethnicity as that of your forefathers. After all the losses, and realism that life in the USSR instilled, my wife maintains a deep love for the society of her youth.
There are many more of those and they won’t be discounted no matter how hard the system tries. The system has a battle that they can’t maintain internally or externally over any length of time.
Putin has a pact. The ordinary people will tolerate his kleptocracy as long as they have stability. If stability vanishes then something will give; but we may not like that either.
Thx for a more thorough explanation of Russia and Putin than we typically see. Appreciated.
Even if one buys the 'justified fears' reading of history, Putin's predilection for, shall we say, 'preventative' aggression makes little sense. The surest defense against potential enemies is to turn them into friends; so a leadership that goes out of its way to turn its country into an international pariah is behaving self-sabotagingly from a security point of view.
Notwithstanding my fervent support of Ukraine, it is refreshing to hear something positive about Russia. May they fall flat on their babushkas in Ukraine.
Thank you for the positivity and fervent support Tom. Kudos on humorously enhancing positivity. We all need relief from the machinations of the world’s current kleptocrats. I got mine by picturing myself falling flat on my grandmother (babushka) and imaging her reaction. It's a softer landing, for me anyways, than having nested matryoshka dolls bone bruising my seventy plus year old disappearing derrière.
There is nothing "quasi" about Putin's fascism. His pretext for invading Eastern Ukraine and Crimea since 2014, that of protecting ethnic Russians from "nazi" Ukrainians, is straight out of Hitler's playbook of absorbing the Sudetenland to protect ethnic Germans and invading Poland for the same purpose. Not to mention Putin's degrading and dismissing Ukrainians using the same terminology as Hitler did for "untermenschen" Slavs.
The best (and most fun) summary of the broader history of Russia's perpetual failure to become a "normal country" was this little book I found; I used to read this woman's blog with my partner (Russian, from Belarus), and we both enjoyed the observations on cultural differences and quirks she offered as an American married to a Russian.
https://www.amazon.com/Have-Personality-Disorder-Will-Russia-ebook/dp/B015HN9E5Q
Putin isn't an anomaly; rather, he reflects a stubborn societal norm - a deep cynicism that's (luckily) hard to explain to people used to our relative comfort here, but has (unfortunately) been getting easier for many to understand lately, as I wrote about recently here:
https://mustardclementine.substack.com/p/reminding-me-of-my-mother-in-law
No sadly nothing good will happen in Russia. It is a kleptocracy where the rich take from the poor and it always has been.
That Russia should presume that it can just dictate the destiny of any other country, and that it should, is a sad statement about Russia. The largest country in the world with 4x the population of Canada and the same GDP can not even take care of itself and it's people feels the need to go beat up on some other country.
It's basket case economy should have convinced them they need to maybe take care of things at home but alas the leaders are not that smart and the people very dim witted. They are too used to being told what to do to think for themselves and the leaders too used to being able to beat up on them and the other unfortunates in Chechnya and George. The cost is the blood of Russian youth not to mention the Ukrainians. Of course Vlad does not care. What are Russian youth for if not to pump his glory.
People celebrated the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now they are not so sure. Just dumb.
The political opinions of the west tend to concentrate on the leader but miss the issue that the leader is necessarily a product of the opinions of at least a large segment of the population. Thanks for the deeper perspective!
Further to your observation on Russia as the last of the European empires, there must be something to the fact that Britain, Spain and even France had geographic “space” separating the lost flock, whereas for Russia as a continental empire, its colonies literally form its internal borders, and it is impossible easily to separate them, short of the drastic sort of re-ordering following the Second World War that drew the modern nation-state boundaries of Eastern Europe. Being partly unnatural (eg the German-Polish border precipated mass expulsions) they must be forcefully supervised to keep the peace.
Keeping the peace is the prime objective. Without peace the betterment of the human condition is difficult to efficiently implement via sound policies that probably should include a logical and natural reshaping of borders. Though we must be careful because every reshaping has a knock on effect. The nuclear complication makes every path treacherous. It is the trump card in the actors’ decks. It contributes to Putin being both bold and reticent, and more importantly, obstinate. It does provide time for sanctions to change minds; but those sanctions will undoubtedly require more patience and gumption than they did for South Africa - an apples to oranges comparison but a template nevertheless.
A lot of very intelligent, knowledgeable, contributors, including author Leigh Sarty have laid out the historical context for which I thank everyone. The purpose of history is to learn from the past - keep the good, fix the bad. If we use it to merely justify a forced future we may do a disservice à la Putin.
Putin may actually have more external security with NATO surrounding his western periphery than he is willing to admit. As long as he behaves according to international norms, NATO members will not bother him internally as it is a self-policing defensive alliance. That frees Putin to concentrate on his eastern and internal borders; which will decline in numbers and length as NATO inevitably creeps eastward. I do, and I don’t, hope Putin reads this because he is an enigma to me and may use my view as fuel.
That is in essence the prime objective of NATO. You may be suggesting that we need an AUTO: All Universe Treaty Organization? Evil men will be tactically constrained in either scenario as NATO has all the appearances of a winner, as it gathers flies like sticky paper for all the right democratic reasons, and could evolve into an AUTO.
To better the full human condition we still need peace as the prime objective because the nuclear option is always lurking in the background. As long as evil men have a button to push we may be effectively ostracizing many of their servants, and future innocent nuclear casualties, from democracy.
“...Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”. With true peace we can perhaps better concentrate our limited resources on democracy’s improvement and expansion?
We will just have to disagree then.
NATO was founded to secure peace in Europe by allying its members in their commitment to democracy, the rule of law, individual liberties and the peaceful resolution of disputes. To give strength to peace as the logical choice of belligerent actors, NATO bound its members to an attack on one being an attack on all.
The historical legacy of wars’ detriments to Europe focused minds theoretically. The more contemporary history of WW1 and WW2, and the exponential growth in destructiveness of modern war motivated theory to defer to practicality. Next, the USSR’s immediate threat was the catalyst that sped up the political and bureaucratic process; but it was not the sole or limiting reason for the founding of NATO.
We can’t take a cavalier historical attitude to MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). We have been on its brink a number of times already. One push of a button, one misstep, can annihilate a lot of history and perhaps all of it. One push of a button can make it completely irrelevant who we descended from.
None of that enshrines that "we have to let them be evil or they'll kill everybody". No correct thinking person or clear thinking proponent of peace would ever condone that. NATO is doing an admirable and Herculean job of tiptoeing around aid to a non-member to stifle evil and lay the groundwork for peace, while incorporating sober cognizance of MAD.
I think you might have nailed it there. Russians are sad people.
Please be kind enough to consider an expansion to your last sentence Colin: Ordinary Russians are very kind, hospitable and gregarious. It is their system and leadership that makes them pretend, or appear, to be publicly sad in the interests of survival.
Russians, and all survivors of communism and its leftovers, have the most amazing collection of funny, nuanced, jokes that make you roll in the aisle. Jokes are a lingua franca that enables the maintenance of your humanity while accommodating “allowed” expressions of your opposition to a system requiring extraordinary bravery to oppose or criticize too openly or directly.
Your comment on Russian humour is underscored by Ed West’s (The Wrong Side of History) “Ideology and the Death of Satire” from Aug 9 on the role of jokes in the Soviet Union: https://open.substack.com/pub/edwest/p/ideology-and-the-death-of-satire?r=1g4myu&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Richard, you warmed the cockles of my heart by providing the pleasure of Ed West. Many thanks. My son keeps a file of communist era jokes that never lose their therapeutic kindred magic or universal historical lessons.
The top comment on Ed West’s article was written by Richard North: “Great article, but the parallels with today are chilling.” That is chilling!
Gorbachev had a sense of humour which licensed Margaret Thatcher to “... like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together.” Volodymyr Zelenskyy is cut from the same cloth of humour. If Putin would see the light of humour in humour we might actually get somewhere; but he duped Angela Merkel, so once KGB always KGB may require us to wait for his successor who is hopefully cut from the Gorbachev - Zelenskyy cloth and isn’t consumed by the system.