Putin has fallen for his own jingoistic rhetoric

More than 150 years ago, the Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev wrote a poem which begins, “Russia cannot be understood with the mind”. It is a sentiment that many have felt in recent days, watching the country’s dictator as he rambles on television, justifying a war that he has plotted, and apparently craved, for months.

Pale and waxy, Vladimir Putin appears to be a man who spends a lot of time in bunkers and who can no longer bear so much as to hear the advice of people who disagree with him.

The sadness of this moment is palpable across the whole continent from Lisbon to the Urals and beyond to Vladivostok. The shudders of fear will not quickly subside.

They are felt with particular force in the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and especially Moldova, in all the USSR’s former eastern European colonies, and in states such as Taiwan and South Korea which find themselves under pressure from other aggressors.

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The full consequences for Ukraine will only be known with time but clearly they are going to be shattering.

It is important to say that millions inside Russia are not on Putin’s side. Millions more will join them in opposing his invasion if, as may well happen, the dead bodies and casualties begin to mount.

Once before, the mothers of young Russian soldiers came out onto the streets during the disastrous 1990s Chechen war and the impact on the then regime was devastating.

More to lose

If today’s Russians find it harder to protest after a decade of repression and intimidation, they equally have a great deal more to lose. Many Russians now enjoy – and many more aspire to – a modern European lifestyle.

They want to trade and interact with the wider world. They want foreign holidays. They want peace and quiet to enjoy evenings in restaurants with friends or watching Netflix at home with loved ones.

The onset of international pariah status, hyperinflation, and the palpable prospect of violence jeopardise all these legitimate desires.

And yet recent weeks have reminded us of another important truth about the Russian world: that it is cripplingly hard to lose an empire.

In 2019, I travelled the entire length of the old Iron Curtain, from Norway’s Arctic frontier with Russia to the dusty meeting point of Turkey and Azerbaijan, everywhere Nato and the old Warsaw Pact bordered one another.

I found many people along the way who were still personally grateful for the cold war’s end and others who thought and knew very little about it. But what struck me most were those who still longed for the lost communist past.

Among the Russian communities I visited, in Russia itself but also in the Baltic States, this strain of nostalgia was particularly marked.

‘Kinder times’

“They were kinder times,” a woman in the Russian frontier city of Vyborg close to the Finnish border told me.

Another, a Russian-speaking pensioner in the Latvian coastal city of Liepaja, sobbed as she recalled a happy Soviet childhood.

All the mothers in her communal apartment had prepared food together each week. The children had had the job of freezing the dumplings by throwing them off the balcony into the snow.

“The Iron Curtain people talk about with its uncrossable borders wasn’t a curtain as such,” she insisted. “In the USSR, people lived by completely different values. The system that existed then allowed us to take joy in the little things – in flowers, in youth.”

Such sentiments sound naïve in our present reality where more than 100,000 Russian troops are manoeuvring westwards once more, reminding us of the iron fist that was always thinly concealed beneath the glove of Soviet propaganda.

But Russians born between the 1940s and the 1980s were taught that they had a “manifest destiny” to control the whole of the Soviet bloc.

They were also indoctrinated with the notion that their country could only ever be a force for good. In the late 1980s, the rejection of these myths by every single non-Russian town, city and country under Moscow’s control was total and pitiless.

Given how brutal this felt at the time and how it changed Russia’s fortunes in the years that followed, a significant proportion of the Russian public was always likely to be susceptible to revanchist populism.

Putin has been filling Russian television screens and school curriculums with jingoism for two decades. Often this has seemed like an entirely cynical ploy, a way of distracting from his and his inner circle’s kleptocratic ways.

But what we must now admit in light of his invasion of a peaceful country is that the Russian president has comprehensively fallen for his own rhetoric. No one is more nostalgic for the USSR than he, no one more hurt by the world’s rejection of it.

What happens next is not up to Putin alone. In some senses, the poker player in the Kremlin has already played his hand and it is for Ukraine, Nato and others who oppose his vision to respond.

There tends to be a limited supply of individuals capable of displaying extreme bravery and selflessness. Authoritarian regimes rely on this.

If they can fire enough bullets, create enough casualties and prisoners, gather enough kompromat, and bribe enough people, they bank on getting their own way.

It now falls to all of us – in Ukraine, in Russia, and everywhere else – to be brave enough and selfless enough to force Putin and his supporters to confront their nostalgia for the fraudulent nonsense it really is. The sacrifice will be felt very unevenly across our continent, but it will be felt by all of us in some way.

Timothy Phillips is a historian and travel writer. His book The Curtain And The Wall: A Journey In The Shadow Of The Cold War will be published by Granta in October