Putin can’t escape history

There is a pattern to Russia’s history, and it may be catching up with President Vladimir Putin.

Under the czars and then the commissars, Russia’s rulers wrenched enormous sacrifice from their people to achieve the power, empire and respect they believed to be Russia’s due, whether by virtue of its vast expanse, natural wealth, culture, ideology or simply its power, only to find at some point that along the way they had lost their exhausted, battered nation.

Yegor Gaidar, the wunderkind who shaped the first post-communist reforms in Russia, mulled on this cyclical pattern in an article in the newspaper Izvestia in 1994, wondering – as did many in Russia and in the West at the time – whether the pattern would repeat itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Russia’s race for a place in the civilized world recalls Achilles’ chase after the tortoise,” Gaidar wrote. “Through superhuman effort, Russia would manage to catch up and overtake, especially in military technology. Yet the world would unnoticeably but steadily move on, and again after disgraceful and tortuous setbacks the country would regroup for a leap and make another lurch, and everything would be repeated.”

Nearly 30 years later, Putin’s ruthless efforts to reconstitute a Great Russia by brute force, in the process mauling Ukraine with shocking cruelty and weakening his own country for decades to come, appear to be falling into Gaidar’s pattern. What Putin had intended as a quick march on Kyiv to install a quisling regime has turned into an embarrassing and costly slugfest, with Russia increasingly forced to back down, as it did most recently in announcing a retreat from Kherson.

Whether Russians have reached the breaking point is another question. The Kremlin’s considerable repressive apparatus has been in high gear since the invasion began, crushing any opposition to the war in Ukraine. Even calling the war anything other than a “special military operation” could be a crime. And Putin’s strongest pitch, that “losing” Ukraine represents a humiliating demotion of Russia the superpower, still resonates among people who were raised on the Soviet ethos, in which empire was a far stronger bond than nationalism.

Yet, whether Russians really accept Putin’s shifting justifications for the war, it is becoming clear that there are limits to what they are prepared to pay for his revanchist dreams. Tens of thousands of Russian men rushed for the borders after Putin announced a mass mobilization, joining the estimated hundreds of thousands of the best and brightest who have fled since the war began. Meanwhile, pro-Kremlin hawks have taken to openly sniping at the incompetence of Russia’s military commanders and the enormous casualties Russia is suffering.

Before the announcement of the recent mass conscription, which was followed by the declaration of martial law in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, about 30% of Russians who were asked by a pro-Kremlin pollster to describe the predominant mood of people around them said they were anxious. Since the decree, that number has risen to 69%. Measuring anxiety is one way pollsters have kept a hand on the national pulse when expressing concern that the “special military operation” carries serious risk.

Keeping tabs on the national mood is critical also for the Kremlin, though a certain level of anxiety is in its interest. Much of Putin’s fearmongering is targeted less at trying to intimidate Ukraine or the West than at keeping Russians on board. The talk of neo-Nazis, NATO at the gates or a decadent West lashing out in its death throes, along with the occasional hint of a potential nuclear Armageddon, all invoke deep-seated national fears among Russians, inherited from World War II and the Cold War. But as the invasion has dragged on, Putin has had to shout “Wolf!” ever more stridently.

In his latest pronouncement, typically a marathon appearance before the Kremlin-controlled Valdai Discussion Club, on October 27, the mendacity of an “aggressive, cosmopolitan, neocolonial,” gender-multiplying West was the dominant theme, with Ukraine cited only as an example of the evil the West is capable of.

Yet even before this tame audience, the moderator injected a note of disquiet and doubt about the war. “Vladimir Vladimirovich, your decision to launch a special military operation in February was, of course, a big surprise for everyone, including the majority of Russian citizens,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, a respected foreign-affairs analyst. “You have repeatedly explained the logic and reasons, we know, but still these are decisions of such a magnitude that, probably, are not made without some special push. What happened before this decision?”

Putin gave his boilerplate response about the need to defend the Russians in the Donbas, but Lukyanov pressed on: “Do you have the feeling, which, frankly, there is in society, that the enemy was underestimated?”

Putin’s answer, of course, was no. He knows instinctively that a dictatorship like his rests partly on fear, but also on his ability to project an image of strength, competence and certainty. With little experience of democracy, Russians have traditionally been content to entrust their government to a strong “khoziayin,” or master, so long as he provides stability and seems to know what he’s doing. But if that contract is violated, as Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, warned in a quote every Russia knows by heart, “God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.”

Putin is aware of that danger. He has frequently depicted the “color revolutions” in Ukraine that twice ejected the Russia-backed president, in 2004 and 2014, as catastrophic events – fomented, of course, by an ever-scheming West. He knows he needs to reassure his populace that everything is going according to plan, that Western sanctions are not doing any harm, that Russia will recover its greatness.

Making Russia great again is a theme Putin has elaborated over many years now, from bemoaning the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “genuine tragedy” to venting his consuming resentment of the “so-called West” – essentially the United States – for not accepting Russia, and himself, as an equal in global power.

He has drawn liberally on his rewriting of Russian history and culture – as he did again in the Valdai speech, citing, among others, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky – to claim a spiritual superiority over a West he sees as decadent and decaying. Never mind that these two writers were both repressed by the state, Soviet and czarist, and that Russia is widely perceived as a kleptocracy.

Much of Putin’s criticism of the West is shared, of course, by the West. Yet Putin approaches not from an informed analysis but through a Soviet prism that profoundly distorted the West, and projected onto it all autocratic and repressive machinations of the Kremlin.

There is no soft power in this equation, no appreciation of reasons Ukraine might be more attracted to Europe than to Russia, but only spheres of control parceled out according to rules of conquest and control that the West rejected after World War II. The longings of the Ukrainians have no part in this; Russia’s – Putin’s – mission is to return to Russia what is Russia’s by right of might.

As to Lukyanov’s question about timing, it is becoming evident that Putin, increasingly isolated during the Covid pandemic, was led to believe by his sycophantic lieutenants that a quick invasion would promptly topple the Kyiv government and herd Ukraine back into the fold, and that the West was too far gone to do anything about it.

The presumptions quickly proved disastrously mistaken. But dictators who have held uncontested power for as long as Putin has are not given to admitting they are ever wrong.

Following the pattern outlined by Gaidar, Putin has responded to setbacks by demanding ever more sacrifice from the Russians for an ever crueler war. But as his predecessors discovered, to their grief, the patience of their nation is not boundless.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.