By David K. Shipler
As terrible as Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine will be for Ukrainians, it also spells suffering for Russians, who
cannot shake their own society’s paranoid, authoritarian traditions. Long gone
is the modicum of pluralistic politics attempted briefly under Mikhail
Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Vanished is the relatively relaxed acceptance of
multilateral interests in “the near abroad,” as Russia calls its European
neighbors. Now, as if reaffirming its tragic history, Russia is firmly back
into autocratic form under Vladimir Putin, with its attendant xenophobia, insularity,
and belligerence.
For all its bigness and might,
Russia has a thin skin, easily penetrated by slights and humiliation. There
have been plenty of those inflicted by the United States and Western Europe,
most dramatically in breaking promises from the early 1990s to refrain from
expanding NATO. But even with that, Putin’s pugnacious sense of victimization
runs far beyond reality. It depends on a demonization of the outside world as
vitriolic as in Communist times. It depends on a vertical flow of power as
dictatorial as the czars’.
Putin’s raging, wounded speech
February 21 setting the stage for war brought back a memory from the 1977 Soviet
Union, when a Moscow police lieutenant stopped a West German television crew
from filming the smoke-damaged exterior of the Rossiya Hotel after a fire that
killed at least twenty. The reporter asked why. The
officer explained, “We do not want to let foreigners laugh at our
misfortune.”
The remark offered a telling insight. To imagine that
foreigners were eager to mock Russia over a deadly fire must have required
extraordinary self-torment, a loneliness of unfathomable pain. There is every
indication, 45 years later, that Russia’s leadership remains stuck in that state
of mind.
The sense of persecution echoes into Putin’s current remarks.
Ukraine “has been reduced to a colony [of NATO] with a puppet
regime,” the Russian
president declared. It “intends to create its own nuclear weapons,”
and “Ukraine’s Western patrons may help it acquire these weapons to create
yet another threat to our country.” Its policy is “to root out
the Russian language and culture and promote assimilation.” It
is subjecting ethnic Russians to “horror and genocide” in Ukraine’s Donbass
region, which—he neglected to mention—was being wracked by an eight-year civil
war that he launched and fueled. Those crimes, he said, were being ignored by
“the so-called civilized world, which our Western colleagues proclaimed
themselves the only representatives of.” He called Ukraine’s democratic
movement, which overthrew the pro-Moscow government in 2014, “Neanderthal and
aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazism.”
These dystopian fantasies about Western designs on Russia’s pride and security make a volatile chemistry. Whether he believes them or not, he uses a technique once described by a Soviet professor as characterizing sophisticated propaganda: “a truth, a truth, a truth and then a lie.”
