I offer two bits of the anglosphere’s past to help us understand two bits of the Russian present.
Firstly,
“I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. … The fact is there is something deeply appealing about him.” (George Orwell, review of ‘Mein Kampf’)
Like the media travestying Trump’s remarks about Putin’s ‘genius move’ into sounding like Trump approved Putin’s invasion, I have used omission to near-invert Orwell’s point. Here it is again, with less omitted.
“I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power – till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking he did not matter – I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs … It is a pathetic, doglike face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs … the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrifing hero who fights single-handedly against impossible odds. … If he were killing a mouse, he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.”
The last sentence is the point; before he finally awakened dragons he could not slay, Hitler spent years being the dragon, and the Jews were not the only victims who were about as much of a threat to him as mice – who only became even a bit dangerous to him because he left them no choice. But he knew how to make it look like the opposite. He knew in terms of conscious propaganda, but it was more than that: “there is little doubt that is how Hitler sees himself”, warns Orwell.
For months, up until ten days ago when he invaded, Putin (and western elites) thought the Ukraine was a mouse that Russian tanks would race through – Biden’s handlers had so written it off they had him invite (beg) Putin to take just a piece of it. But Putin’s propagandists knew their task was to make it look like a dragon. How to explain invading Crimea under Obama, and Ukraine under Biden, and nowhere under Trump, while claiming you’re doing it because you feel threatened – threatened not by Ukraine as such (bit of a hard sell, that) but by big bad America’s use of Ukraine? Luckily for them, Putin’s narrative has an ally – Biden’s narrative. How to explain Putin doing nothing under Trump, then invading after the U.S. flees Afghanistan, while locals who’d relied on them dropped from aircraft wings? Thus it is that the two insolent, imbecile narratives – Putin’s (that he’s invading because the US looks active, not because it looks pathetically weak) and Biden’s (that he causes Putin concern, not contempt) – acquire strange echoes and overlaps from their mutual need to write Trump out of the story, to explain away why it’s happening now, not then.
Secondly, that is not the whole story. You miss something central if you think this deflection is happening only in Putin’s conscious mind. The full story (that is, what I’m guessing is the full story) is rather odd to the western mind. I hope my next historical anecdote will make it more relatable.
The Americans had friends as well as foes in Britain’s parliament during their revolution – people as highly placed as former prime minister Pitt the elder, who were ready to defend the justice of the American case, to vote for them to have assurances, rights, no taxation without representation – but not independence. Edmund Burke, MP for Bristol, told his fellow MPs they
looked at the position in a wrong point of view, and talked of it as a mere matter of choice when, in fact, it was now become a matter of necessity. … It was incumbent on Great Britain to acknowledge it directly. On the day he [Burke] first heard of the American States having claimed independency, it made him sick at heart … because he saw it was a claim essentially injurious to this country and a claim Great Britain could never get rid of.
Burke felt as strongly as any other British MP how they all disliked the idea of the American colonies ceasing to be part of the British nation – and so worked hard to resolve tensions, to maintain or restore the “rights of Englishmen” for which the rebels first fought. At celebrations of the American revolution he therefore has a slightly equivocal place. The clarity of his high-minded explanations help establish the justice of the American Revolution – which he tried very hard to avert by removing its cause. Only
“When things had come to this pass (which no-one laboured to prevent more than I)”
did Burke tell his fellow British MPs that American independence, was no longer a matter of choice, no longer a debating chip to be traded away in negotiations – so Britain’s true interest was no longer to refuse a thing so “essentially injurious” to the mother country, but to part on as friendly terms as could be managed.
Others lacked such insight. Years later, America’s friends in parliament yielded to military necessity what they were slow to yield to Burke’s ‘necessity’.
It was a useful lesson. The better part of two centuries elapsed before the British empire had “it’s finest hour”, soon followed by its last (of existing on the scale that had once seen it not just a world power but the world power). Parting on good terms was now accepted as the goal – which left the UK still ready and able to punch a bit above its weight in coalitions with its friends.
Like Britain, Russia could be a great power with its empire – and a prosperous, safe, happy power without it, but not a great power bestriding the world in splendid isolation. Russia has no need to rule the Ukraine – but Imperial Russia does, and that in turn needs the Ukraine to be not a real country, not a thing innate and of itself. Putin doesn’t just lie about the Ukraine existing only as a US puppet. He has to confabulate that it is, because, in his imperial vision of Russia, the Ukraine can’t be real.
– The Ukraine isn’t a real country, so obviously the Ukraine cannot be seeking ties with NATO because Putin has been saying for years that it never really existed and must cease to exist; that’s unimaginable as the cause. So clearly, those wicked Americans have corrupted the Ukrainian government into acting against it’s own interests. (When the wicked American is Joe Biden, it helps that the part about causing corruption in the Ukraine is no lie.)
– The Ukraine isn’t a real country so it cannot matter that Russian rule of the Ukraine began in a word translatable as ‘serf’ or as ‘slave’, and in living memory meant Stalin, famine and purge on a scale meeting the UN definition of genocide. Russia had serfs and Stalin too, and the Ukraine, not being another country, cannot be acting out of a distinct, grimmer, historical memory.
Thus Putin is not simply lying when his actions show he knows the U.S. has never been weaker, yet he insists America is driving events in Ukraine. The Ukraine cannot be acting autonomously, still less from fear of the man who has so clearly explained that it’s not a real country – because the Ukraine is not a real country.
And it is by this that he has been punished. Ten days ago, he had everything whose existence he believed in sewn up: a self-prostrated US; a Europe that had chosen to be dependent on his energy; woke weakness everywhere in the west. It was the perfect time to act. What could go wrong?
In the west, we’ve said Mr Putin is wicked, we’ve renamed Chicken Kievs “Chicken Kvivs” in the shops, we’ve even expelled Russia from the Eurovision Song Contest. While cancel culture crazies loudly apply their usual techniques to ban Dostoevsky (university of Milan), to withdraw the film Anastasia (Disney), and to clear the shelves of bottles of Smirnoff (actually made in Latvia), the World Economic Forum has very quietly scrubbed Putin from their website.
Less uselessly, we’re rethinking buying so much of our energy from him. Some NATO members are talking about meeting their treaty obligations. We’ve banned Russia from the SWIFT system. Zelensky having refused Biden’s proffered ride out (“thou thought I was even such a one as thyself”), the ammunition he demanded instead is now being supplied – and the weapons that Trump was giving them are now flowing again. If you volunteer to fight for the Ukrainians, the west will let you go (and stay behind).
And we wouldn’t have done any of these things if Putin had raced through the Ukraine as fast as he, and the western smart set, thought he would. The west driving events in Ukraine? No, for the last ten days, events in the Ukraine have driven the west. Putin ramps up his narrative; Biden’s handlers scramble to reorient his; the unanticipated reality of the Ukraine drives events.
Which is alas dangerous to the Ukraine that Putin now dimly knows exists, since the obvious way for him to deal with this unexpected development is to decide it’s not too late to kill it. He expected to look like Hitler racing through Austria. Today, he looks more like Stalin invading Finland. He fears looking like Mussolini invading Greece. Putin will endure much before he lets that happen; so may the Ukraine.