Thoughts on Russia Prompted in Part by a Book by Masha Gessen

 

Thoughts on Russia Prompted in Part by a Book by Masha Gessen.

March 27, 2022

 

I just finished reading the book The Future is History, How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen.[1] It is a very impressive book about how Russia developed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gessen’s book prompted some of the comments I make here. Others are only mine. Given the crisis the current Russian invasion of Ukraine has created, I hope you will find my comments interesting and helpful.

Gessen contends that after the Soviet Union began to fall apart in the late 1980s and was gone late in 1991, the Russian people lost the only identity they had been permitted to have through the seventy-four years of Soviet communism. They no longer knew who they were or what Russia was. Gessen explains that development in part by making a distinction between two types of freedom. There is ”freedom to” and “freedom from.” Both types of freedom probably sound positive to those of us from the West, but the Russian people experienced them differently. “Freedom from” sounds to me at least like freedom from all of repression of the Soviet years, but “freedom from” played differently in Russia. To the Russians, it was freedom from the security and stability of life in the USSR. In that system everyone at least knew what their place was in the tightly controlled, hierarchical structure of rule by the Communist Party. Gessen says that after Stalin’s death in 1953 the Party used infrequent bits of random terror to keep everyone slightly off balance, slightly apprehensive. In that state of affairs, the last thing most of the people wanted to do was upset the system that ordered their lives and gave them meaning as citizens of a world power engaged in the supposedly great socialist experiment of building communism. Gessen cites research that shows that in the three decades (a few years less than that when she wrote the book) since the end of the USSR, what the Russian people have wanted most is a return to the stability of the Soviet system. They also believe that only a strong leader can give them that stability. They have developed a nostalgia for Josef Stalin. He became for them a great hero because he had established a stable order and had defeated the Germans in the Great Patriotic War (which we call World War II). They either don’t know or just overlook the fact that he was one of the great monsters of human history.

Gessen says that in the first years after 1991 it looked like Russia was developing at least in the direction of a Western style liberal democracy. Gessen posits however that liberal democracy never had a chance in Russia. She says it didn’t because the people were more interested in stability and security than in Western style democratic freedoms. I think she’s right about that, but I would add another element to the dynamic that made it extremely unlikely that Russia would become a bigger version of today’s Germany or France. That factor is Russian history going back long before the Soviet communists arrived on the scene. There has never been in Russia anything at all like the democratic systems of western Europe and the United States in which the people actually elect their leaders and the law protects their individual rights. After the revolution of 1905 there was something called the Duma that looked like a parliament, but the tsar was free to veto or just disregard anything the Duma did. After Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, there was for a while the Provisional Government that was made up mostly of people committed to western style democracy. They were however utterly ineffective is doing anything that Russia really needed at the time. Most of all, they didn’t get Russia out of World War I, where the Russians were taking a licking from the Germans. The Bolshevik coup of November 1917, (October in the calendar Russia was using at the time) put an end to the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks won the civil war that followed. In 1922 they created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which became one of the least democratic, most oppressive state systems the world has ever known.

Gessen argues that President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has created a political system that has in common with the Soviet Union that it has a patina of democracy superimposed over a totalitarian regime.[2] The system looks like a democracy. Putin’s regime is not as repressive as the Soviets had been. There are elections for the president and a few other positions. Yet on the inside the system functions in much the same way that the Soviet system did. The state has concentrated essentially all political power in the office of the president. It has concentrated economic power in a few people who are loyal to it. Owners of large businesses who criticize the government are likely to have the state take their businesses away from them and give them to people more loyal to Putin. Those former owners may also face imprisonment on false charges (usually of financial wrongdoing), expulsion from the country, or even murder. Political and economic power in Putin’s Russia are highly centralized and controlled by the government.

Gessen says that the post-Soviet regime in Russia uses warfare as a way of looking like the strong state the people want. Her examples are Russia’s war in the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 2008 and the Russian takeover of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. She also mentions the secessionist movements in the eastern part of Ukraine called the Donbas, movements Russia has supported with military aid. She wrote this book several years before Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine, so she doesn’t mention it. It does however fit the pattern she describes perfectly.

In each of the instances of war Gessen mentions, and in the current invasion of Ukraine, Putin has copied the example of Adolf Hitler. In 1938, after getting Great Britain and France to let him do it, Hitler invaded and occupied the border regions of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland after the Sudeten mountains. The population of the Sudetenland was predominantly German. Hitler claimed that he did it to defend the Germans of the region who, he said, the Czechs were oppressing. He said those Germans should never have been included in Czechoslovakia when that country was created after World War I but should always have been part of the German homeland.

Putin says exactly the same thing about people who are linguistically and culturally Russian but who live in former Soviet republics other than Russia. There are significant numbers of such people in all of the former Soviet republics, but this demographic circumstance is particularly apparent in Ukraine. There are areas within the independent nation of Ukraine where the population is majority Russian not Ukrainian. These areas include Crimea, the Donbas, and the city the Ukrainians call Kharkiv, and the Russians call Kharkov, located in northeast Ukraine near the Russian border. There are many Russians elsewhere in Ukraine too. There are also many Ukrainians living in Russia, but they don’t seem to be an issue for Putin.

Putin presents himself as the protector of the Russians in Ukraine against Ukrainian oppression. He has even accused the Ukrainians of genocide against those Russians, never mind that there isn’t a shred of evidence that the Ukrainians have ever done any such thing. He says the majority Russian parts of Ukraine should never have been in Ukraine in the first place. Ukraine’s current border with Russia is the border of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic when the Soviet Union dissolved. Except in the far west of Ukraine where the border between the USSR and the nations of eastern Europe was changed after World War II, most of the border between Russia and Ukraine was set by communist bureaucrats in Moscow back in the 1920s. Putin says Russia accepted that border when the USSR broke up only because Russia was so weak at the time that it could not accomplish any revision of the border. He speaks of Russia having “lost” the Russians of Ukraine and elsewhere when the Soviet Union dissolved and each of the fifteen constituent republics of the country became independent states.

There is another aspect of Putin’s understanding of Ukraine that Gessen mentions briefly. There are today three nations in which the majority population is east Slavic. They are Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia. Linguists say there are three east Slavic languages—Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian. In the days of the Russian Empire the Russians considered Ukrainian and Belorussian to be only dialects of Russian not separate languages. No reputable linguist today agrees with that assertion. Putin does. He says that the three east Slavic peoples are actually only one people, some of whom speak a rather difficult to understand dialect of Russian. I am sure virtually no Ukrainian or Belorussian person agrees with him. Yet Putin makes that assertion in support of his desire to unite all east Slavic people in one restored Russian empire. The leader of Belorussia today is a close ally of Putin’s, so we hear of no trouble between those two nations. Most Ukrainians, however, want their country to align itself with NATO and the European Union not with Russia. It may well be that Putin thought that by invading Ukraine he could oust the current government and put in one that would bring Ukraine into Russia’s orbit. If so, so far that effort has failed.

There are many other interesting parts of Gessen’s book. Here’s one of them. I knew that several years ago the Russian government enacted a law that prohibits what it calls “homosexual propaganda.” No one in Russia may advocate gay rights or do much of anything in defense of LGBTQ+ people without violating that law. I didn’t know just how that law came about. As Gessen tells it, anti-gay propagandists, the Russian Orthodox Church, and Putin’s government made a direct connection between homosexuality and pedophilia. We know that there is not such connection. Most of the men who sexually molest boys are straight. Still, anti-gay bigots in Russia whipped the Russian people into an anti-gay frenzy. Innocent men were accused of sexually abusing boys. The advocates of the law shouted, “We must protect the children!” Predictably, violence against men who were gay or who someone only thought were gay increased. LGBTQ+ people in Russia have been driven back into the closet where they had been under the Soviets. As Gessen tells it, the cultural conditions which produced that terrible law have made life for sexual minorities in Russia extremely difficult.

Putin’s regime’s assault on gays is actually part of a larger aspect of Putin’s agenda. He is trying to recreate the Soviet Union, or perhaps more accurately the Russian Empire, as closely as he can. He wants Russia again to have the dominance it once had over all of the former Soviet/Russian empire. He knows of course that there was a sharp ideological divide between the USSR and the West during the Cold War. The Soviet Union represented totalitarian communism. The West, including primarily the United States, represented free market economics and political democracy which protected individual rights. Now Putin, as far as he’s concerned, has created a divide between western social liberalism and Russian social conservatism. He sounds much like our American evangelical bigots. He says Western liberal values are destroying the family, and he claims to be the guardian of traditional family values. He sees Russia as the protector of what he considers to be collective social wellbeing whereas the West puts too much emphasis on the individual. He claims to be defending traditional Christian values against Western secularism.

In this regard he has an ally in the Russian Orthodox Church. There is much that is wonderful about Orthodox Christianity. Its liturgy is powerful even if you don’t understand the words the priests are saying. The Orthodox churches’ position on social issues is definitely not one of the wonderful things about them. Those churches, of which the Russian Orthodox Church is by far the largest, are and always has been radically conservative in their views on social and moral issues. The Orthodox churches also have a long tradition of supporting the government and the ruling elites of the countries of which they are a part regardless of what those governments and elites actually stand for. That tradition goes all the way back to the fourth century CE when Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire. The patriarch of Moscow openly campaigns for Putin in Russia’s rigged presidential elections. The Russian Orthodox Church enthusiastically supports Putin’s social bigotry and is in no way a moral counterweight to it.

Does Putin really believe the things he says about LGBTQ+ people being a threat to the family? Does he really think male homosexuality and pedophilia go together? There’s no way to know, but it really doesn’t matter. What matters is the way he uses social conservatism to whip up political support for himself and his political allies. He uses it to give Russia a new identity to replace the old communist one Russia lost when the Soviet Union folded. He uses it to generate support for him and his policies by making a distinction between Russia and West much as one existed in what he considers to have been the good old days of the USSR.

Putin’s ideology and personality cause him to take some positions that are fanciful but dangerous. He tells the Russian people that the United States is working to extend its political and economic domination over all the earth. He may be right about that, but he also says that the United States instigates and finances things like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine of late 2004 and early 2005 that drove a pro-Russian (and horribly corrupt) president of Ukraine out of the country. He seems to believe, or at least he says he believes, that the US is out to bring about regime change in Russia. President Biden’s recent statement that Putin cannot remain in power plays directly into this narrative of Putin’s. It gives him strong evidence to support his claim and to generate support among the Russian people.

As the subtitle of her book states, Gessen believes that Russia is once again a totalitarian state of the kind it was under the Soviet communists. Putin’s government doesn’t look like the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on the outside, but under a cover of democracy it operates in essentially the same way. Putin has condemned the communist ideology of the USSR, but he wants to recreate the USSR in every other respect. His passion to reestablish Russian dominance over what was the USSR makes him a continuing threat to peace in that part of the world. He will remain a threat regardless of how his invasion of Ukraine works out. I hope and pray that he will not do in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, each of them like Ukraine a former Soviet Socialist Republic, what he has done in Ukraine. Unlike Ukraine, each of them is a member of NATO. Each is covered by Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which says that an attack on any NATO member is an attack on all NATO members. The last thing in the world NATO needs is a war with Russia, one of the world’s major nuclear powers. I hope that Putin realizes that the last thing Russia needs is a war with NATO.

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[1] Gessen, Masha, The Future is History, How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, (Riverhead Books, New York, 2017).

[2] The various constitutions of the USSR over the course of its existence did things like establish free elections and guarantee rights of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. Those constitutions were merely window dressing. No Soviet citizen was allowed to raise the guarantee of rights in the constitution as a defense when charged with having said or written the wrong thing.