There is an old saying that everything in Russia changes in five years, but nothing in a hundred years.
University of Tampere
8 February 2024
In his recent novel Bolshoi Gopnik – The Great Thug, (A neologism from the 1920s), Viktor Jerofejev sums up the origin of the ongoing war in a succinct way:
“The most important man in Russia has created in his head a different reality. A reality that is not understood in Ukraine, Europe, or in America. I have observed in Ukraine the elementary change for our [Russian] future. If it works for them, then one day it can work for us too. Something has emerged in Ukraine. The Great Thug has created the Ukrainian nation and welded it together with blood.”
In his well respected newsletter Comment is Free, the historian of nuclear strategy Lawrence Freedman quotes an obsservation from the publication War on the Rocks:
“Both Ukraine and Russia have regularly been seen as the conflict’s inevitable victor — only to fall back down to earth when the expectations created failed to live up to reality.”
Freedman identifies a phenomenon which anyone following events closely will recognize – the tendency for narratives of either a Russian or a Ukrainian victory to grip the commentariat, only to be followed by a swing in the other direction as a breakthrough fails to materialize and the supposedly losing side turns out to be more resilient than expected.
So much about the ongoing war. Let me instead try totake a closer look at the historic background of what Viktor Jerofejev describes as the birth of a nation. I published last summer a lengthy piece in Carnegie Eurasia with the title “The End of a Tragic Triangle – Russia, Ukraine and Poland”.
My thesis is simply that it is embarrassing to realize that the prevalent rendering of Russian history in the West is still the canonized simplification of a straight path from ancient Kyiv to Moscow. This is the myth of the reunification of the dispersed children of Kyivan Rus. This imperial Russian and Stalinist view was adopted and perfected by Vladimir Putin
In a way, this is understandable. History is written by the victors. But after the annexation of Crimea and the war of attrition in the Donbas, and now the full-scale Russian war against Ukraine, it is an uncomfortable truth that we accepted the Russian perspective, which has had the prerogative of interpretation for two centuries. This is partly due to ignorance, but also because of negligence.
The metaphor of a tragic triangle is illustrated by the double pressure felt by the Ukrainians throughout centuries. It was Polonization and/or Russification and even Magyarization of the Ukrainian elites. The defense of Ukraine against Polish influence became the leitmotif of Russian policy. During the famine Holodomor caused by the forced collectivization in Ukraine, Stalin reminded his trusted aide and the party boss of Soviet Ukraine Lazar Kaganovich of the importance of Ukraine because [Poland’s leader Jozef] “Pilsudski does not dally.” Stalin saw Ukraine, as Putin does, through a Polish prism. The classic Stalinist novel How the Steel Was Tempered(1932, 1936) by Nikolai Ostrovsky has a telling passage where familiar persons from the hero’s home region are spotted as Polish diplomats in a luxurious rail carriage and despised as traitors. Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov’s words that Poland was a bastard of Versailles sum up the road to World War II.
It should be no surprise that the Russia-Ukraine-Poland triangle is at the forefront of the present war. But the dramatic shift of borders after World War II changed Poland in a remarkable way. For the first time in history, Poland is all but mono-ethnic and mono-confessional. When the Soviet Union lost its outer empire, the Warsaw Pact, and shortly afterward its inner empire, the Ukrainian-Polish border opened. The number of Ukrainians working in Poland grew rapidly to be followed now by Ukrainian refugees in millions. In Jerofejev’swords the Great Thug hates Poland because Poland prevents us from tearing Europe apart. Poland is the most committed of all of Ukraine’s allies, and the hinterland of the Polish-Ukrainian border is the hub of all Western aid, lethal and non-lethal.
Most importantly, when Ukraine re-emerged in 1991, the Polish question was redundant, because Poland recognized the Ukrainian border. According to Timothy Snyder, it was “a Polish anti-imperial move vis-à-vis themselves.” It was the intellectual achievement of the Solidarnosc movement to have re-thought the Polish-Ukrainian relationship.
It is correct that the tragic triangle I am referring to, is no more. The same applies to the not so holy alliance of Russia and Prussia/Germany that shared a view of the undesirability of a Polish state located between themand partitioned Poland four times as a result. The front lines today have shifted and are clear. To quote Thomas Friedman of the New York Times (25.1.2024)
“Ukraine is trying to break away from the chocking Russian sphere of influence to become a part of the European Union. Vladimir Purin is trying to block it, because he knows that if Slavic Ukraine – with its vast engineering talent, land army and agricultural breadbasket – joins the European web, his thieving Slavic autocracy will be more isolated and delegitimized than ever.”
This is exactly what Putin himself stated when he a year before the attack spoke about Ukraine having turned into anti-Rossija. It is my reading that this is the real reason for the war, not simply Zbig Brzezinski’s astute observation:
“Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”
In his recent article in Foreign Affairs Bill Burns, now the Head of CIA who served as the Ambassador in Moscow 2005-08, notes the following:
“I have spent much of the past two decades trying to understand the combustible combination of grievance, ambition, and insecurity that Russian President Vladimir Putin embodies. One thing I have learned is that it is always a mistake to underestimate his fixation on controlling Ukraine and its choices. Without that control, he believes it is impossible for Russia to be a great power or for him to be a great Russian leader. That tragic and brutish fixation has already brought shame to Russia and exposed its weaknesses, from its one-dimensional economy to its inflated military prowess to its corrupt political system.”
Putin tried something that Brezhnev succeeded with Czechoslovakia in 1968 – a surprise attack – but failed.To capture the airport of the capital with airborne troops, to arrest or eliminate the leadership and let the tank columns mop up the rest. Instead, Putin found himself entangled in a real war that enters its third year in a couple of weeks. Let me emphasize that the war in Ukraine validates the Finnish defense concept. Repelling a strategic surprise attack is one of the priorities.
Why did Putin’s Russia take this path? It is a complicated history but let me try to come with some suggestions. A president emerging from the world of the siloviki concluded early that a European system based on the rule of law is not suitable for Russia. Private property had been introduced and great wealth appeared, but property rights were never confirmed, and entrepreneurship was never encouraged.
There is an old saying that everything in Russia changes in five years, but nothing in a hundred years. The reforms of the 1990s and those introduced by the Putin’s team of his early years came to a halt with Mihail Khodorkovsky’s arrest and expropriation in 2003. As a result, growing state and crony capitalism with rampant corruption developed. The oligarchs from the wild 90’s had to acquiesce or risk losing their property. The old patrimonial rule applied again. Property remains at the whim of the ruler. The German language differentiatesbetween Besiztum and Eigentum. This finally blocked the European path. Logically a European path for Ukraine became unacceptable and a potential threat to the Russian system.
My second argument is military. Putin decided early on that Russia will not give up nor compromise its status as the nuclear peer of the United States. President Bush’s decision to renounce the ABM treaty in 2001 was motivated by an emerging North Korean and Iranian ballistic missile threat. As seen by the Kremlin this did, however, not exclude the possibility that one day American superior technology could threaten the Russia second strike capability too, even if that was not the initial strategy. Thus, arms control lost its attraction for the Kremlin and resources were poured into the nuclear triad and the army was neglected, something the war against Ukraine has thoroughly proven.
On the surface the perspective of a “forever war” seems to favor Russia with its larger arms industry and human resources. Sustaining Putin’s one-man rule clearly requires continuation of the war. As Russia is unable to force Ukraine to surrender or convince the West to withdraw its support, a forever war is an impasse. So far, popular support in Russia has not wavered, but the system is much more fragile than it seems. The Prigozhin mutiny was a telling example. To quote Bill Burns again:
“The short-lived mutiny launched last June by the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin offered a glimpse at some of the dysfunction lurking behind Putin’s carefully polished image of control. For a leader who painstakingly crafted a reputation as the arbiter of order, Putin looked detached and indecisive as Prigozhin’s ragtag mutineers made their way up the road to Moscow. For many in the Russian elite, the question was not so much whether the emperor had no clothes as why he was taking so long to get dressed.”
The same goes for the spontaneous pogroms in Dagestan or massive demonstrations in Bashkiria. The law enforcement bodies as they are known in Russian,“the organs”, were paralyzed, and required to wait for orders from the Kremlin. The risk of broaderdissatisfaction remains low as long as the government can avoid wider mobilization. The coffers still allow the recruitment of soldiers from the poor provinces in Northern Caucasus and Southern Siberia rather than from Moscow and St. Petersburg. It remains to be seen whether “Russia’s ruthless renaissance” is achievable where Russia re-creates itself economically, socially, and culturally, as a blog published by the Wilson Center suggests.
There are very few outside powers that can influence the Kremlin. Sanctions are working but have not decisively hampered the Russian military effort. China is a joker in the game. It is wary of the rules of the American dollar system and, therefore, not willing to risk breaking sanctions. Chinese banks are not replacing Western banks, and China has not become a supplier of weapons and ammunition to Russia. This role has been taken by North Korea. Something that with all likelihood has not pleased Beijing but at the same time illustrates the problems facing Russian military industry.
The only significant exception remains the clear message delivered by Xi Jinping to both Putin and the Western leaders in 2022 that the threat to use nuclear weapons is unacceptable. This statement effectively eliminated the escalatory tool of nuclear blackmail from the hands of the Kremlin that had fallen back into Khrushchevian loose talk about nukes.
It is worth noting that all information of U.S. – Chinese contacts be it on the presidential level or between National security advisers always refer among other subjects to the war in Ukraine. In his recent video call with Xi, President Niinistö raised the same issue. Yes, the Kremlin cannot ignore China, but whether Beijing will act and try to convince Putin to end the war is something we do not know for now.
One thing remains clear, when changes come in Russia,they come as a surprise and the situation changes very quickly.
