Putin’s Unintended Place in History: Destroyer not Reuniter of Rus’

Subject: Putin’s Unintended Place in History:
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2022
From: Ira Straus <irastraus@aol.com>

Putin’s Unintended Place in History:
Destroyer not Reuniter of Rus’
By Ira Straus

Putin has cemented his place in history, but it is not the one he wanted. He will be remembered, not as the reuniter of ancient Rus’, but as its final destroyer.

The lands of Rus’ are being set to war against each other. Rus’ is being torn apart by the very troops he sent to reclaim them. The last surviving sentiments of mutual attachment — the fundamental underpinning of any union — are being shredded by him, turned into mutual hatred.

Rus’ had suffered, to be sure, a thousand years of erosion before Putin. But he is the one who drove the final stake into its heart.

In the earlier periods, some of those fabled “mystic bonds of memory and sentiment” had always endured. The Mongols smashed the quasi-unity of medieval Rus’ on the political level, and started the Muscovite, Belarusian and Ukrainian societies on the paths of distinctive historical development; yet there was still enough mutual sentiment left to enable the Ivans and Peter to put much of Rus’ back together. The Communist Revolution smashed Rus’ again, resurrected it in a legally federal form, and further drained its spirit. The federal units separated as Communism died out. What friendly sentiment remained was a secondary part of the reality of sovereign separateness; its survival depended on its being accepted as secondary to that primary reality and no one trying to reimpose it by force.

Now Putin has severed that bond of sentiment too. Even in Belarus he has succeeded in the difficult task of making Russia the enemy of the bulk of the society.

With this, Rus’ is gone. What remains is a hollow military shell. He may keep for the moment an empire of lands living in fear, but it will be doomed to early collapse.

This was foreseen several years ago by Igor Chubais, a sincere slavophilic advocate of regathering Rus’ as best as could still be done. Already in 2014 he wrote in anguish that Putin, with his first invasions of Ukraine, had shredded and reduced to a myth those ancient bonds of sympathy of Rus’.

History will record that Putin completed that shredding in 2022.

Putin ignores the reality by telling himself that what counts is power, which will create its own sentiment. He thinks of his historical role models. And did indeed largely work 500 years ago, although it didn’t work so perfectly even then. But this is not the 16th century. Karl Deutsch showed how modern society has grown strong national sentiments, with networks and nerves of intimate national communication and memory banks. That has made nationalism a force to be reckoned with, in a way Peter the Great never knew. In the modern world, a forced union perpetuates the sentiment of enmity, not unity. Only an inter-national union based on consent can build a positive balance sheet for the inter-national sentiment.

The one imaginable hope left for Greater Rus’, in face of Putin’s assault on it, would be a new kind of unity in rebellion of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples, one in which they are all fighting the Russian tyranny that is putting them in danger.

A number of Belarusians are in fact volunteering to give their lives in Ukraine in the fight against Putin. In this, and perhaps only this, Rus’ still exists. They are fighting, to be sure, not for a new union, but for each other’s mutual independence this time — “for your freedom and ours”, in the language of the dissident internationale of the Soviet-era. If they all succeed, it will restore a measure of amity between their peoples, even if laced with a residue of suspicion.

So, my dear Russians out there who want there to be a greater Rus’: Take note! There is still one way left for you to achieve a bit if this! It is by enlisting alongside the Ukrainians and alongside their Belarusian volunteers in their fight against Putin’s invaders. Whatever your estimate of the odds facing this struggle, you may at least know that it is a noble one.

Getting Russia hated globally: Putin’s larger legacy

Putin will go down in history as the man who has brought the blame down on Russia itself, no longer just on the Soviet Union, for the Soviet horrors of the last century.

In 1987-1991, Russia had largely exempted itself from getting the full blame and hated for Communism. It had done this by taking the lead in dismantling Communism, allowing Eastern Europe its freedom, and finally divorcing the Soviet Union itself, presenting itself as a new country that had also been persecuted by the Communists. If this had been done as a trick, it would have been a brilliant one.

This self-exemption was buttressed by the analysis of Dmitry Mikheyev: that the evils of Communism were a consequence, not of Russian culture per se, but of the Communist subculture in Russia. He pointed out that Communism was a minority subculture in the West as well as in Russia, and was a sworn enemy of all the mainstream cultures around it, not the embodiment of those cultures. To be sure, it was in Russia that it came to power. There its totalitarian mentality had a greater overlap with the surrounding autocratic culture than Mikheyev acknowledged. Still, he could make a good case that the primary blame fell on Communism itself, not on Russia.

Putin inherited this huge gift from Gorbachev and Yeltsin — the gift of exempting Russia from implacable suspicion and hatred that the Soviet-era regime had earned with its mass murders and its devastation of the world order. He benefitted from that gift and he squandered it.

Putin has finally turned the gift into its opposite. He has undone the hard-won exemption for Russia. The Russian past will be retrospectively reevaluated in the minds and emotions of the world. Fair or not, all its past horrors will be added back onto the blame for the ones it is perpetrating today, and vice versa. A dark view of it will persist for a long time.

Putin forges a unified Ukrainian National Identity against Russia

Putin has forged for the first time a strong national identity for Ukraine. He has baptized it in fire as an anti-Russian identity.

As Putin argued in his now-famous historical essay, a consistent Ukrainian national identity, divorced from Russia and uniting a large majority of Ukrainians: this is something that was previously unknown. But, with his violent attacks on Ukraine, he has finally created that identity.

Putin has turned millions of Ukrainians into fighters for their country against Russia. He has turned Russia into Ukraine’s formative national enemy.

Mr. Putin alone has been able to shape Ukraine’s identity as an identity against Russia. The Western Ukrainian nationalist minority always failed to do this, not for want of trying. The swing toward anti-Russianism by the Yushchenko government only brought a swing of the Ukrainian Center to vote for the pro-Russian Yanukovych, getting him legitimately elect him for the first time ever. This showed how stable, practically indestructible, the old Ukrainian political balance had been — until Putin made too many demands on Ukraine for subordination in 2013, for a moment seemed to get what he wanted, and invaded in 2014 when the people refused to accept subordination.

That was what destroyed the old political balance in Ukraine, until then maintained by the country’s Center faction as it maneuvered between East and West. It drove the Center faction irrevocably to the side of the West.

Putin’s invasions also turned a large majority of Ukrainians into supporters of joining NATO. Prior to 2014, a robust majority had always been against joining NATO. When NATO membership was promoted by Yushchenko, the majority against it actually grew larger; the Ukrainian Center saw it would be too divisive. But a majority today not only wants to join NATO, but to join it specifically against Russia. This is not because Ukrainians are being manipulated by occult neo-Nazi forces and the West, as Putin says in his language of paranoid fantasy. It is for the simple reason that his attacks caused Ukrainians to have an existential need for protection from Russia.

It is as if Putin has run the Central and Eastern Ukrainians through a transmogrifier, turning the bulk of them into Western Ukrainians. He has shrunk the pro-Russian sector tremendously, from one of Ukraine’s three constituent factions to a marginal one.

Putin may think it unfair to blame him for this. He was a Kremlin centrist in most of his years, after all. But he has transmogrified himself as well as Ukraine. Everyone outside of his bubble has realized that, when he and his faction talk about genocidal Nazis, there is an element of Freudian projection in this. His medieval-style starvation and bombardment sieges of the great cities or Ukraine, his threats of nuclear war, his reckless attacks on nuclear reactors, his talk of a final solution to “the Ukrainian case”: it has all been seen worldwide. No matter how thick a fog he creates with lies and censorship, everyone knows the basic truth; at least, everyone who wants to know.

The world rightly takes a dark view of Putin’s Russia today. This darkness will be read back into the Russia of previous times. It will color the understanding of everything in Russian history, fair or not.

This dark view Russia can only be brightened slightly by the thousands of Russians who are speaking out against the war and getting arrested by the thousands. They are saving their honor; more would be needed to save the honor of their country.

We are now in a new era of Russia. In a symbolic close to the era of Gorbachev and glasnost, Echo Moskvy shuts down, and a law is passed against speech giving 15 years in jail for honest reporting. We enter the era of a Russian Milosevic, named for the Serb power broker who destroyed his own greater country in the name of saving it.

Most Russians have thus far been supporting the Milosevic-style regime. Most repeat its lies, taking cover in each other’s lies so they don’t have to face their inner selves where they know it’s not true. It has become a national thing to do, a “strength in numbers” thing — and a way to spit in the face of the world.

Global loathing is brought down on Russia by this. It outweighs, unfortunately, the courage of the thousands of jailed protesters. Russia could be relieved of this loathing only if people inside the Kremlin took up the protesters’ cause and saw it through.