David Remnik of the New Yorker interviewed the top Russian scholar, Stephen Kotkin, about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This is a longer than normal post - there is a lot to learn here:
FAULTY RUSSIAN EXCEPTIONALISM’S DEMANDS:
Russia has had ambitions of being a great power all the way
back to Peter the Great, but they aren’t great economically, so they try to be
great by military might, but the economic foundation is too weak.
“Russian
foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded
the country’s capabilities…they cannot relinquish that sense of
exceptionalism, that aspiration to be the greatest power, but they cannot match
that in reality. Eurasia is just much weaker than the Anglo-American model of
power. Iran, Russia, and China, with very similar models, are all trying to
catch the West, trying to manage the West and this differential in power.”
DESPOTISM IS CUT
OFF FROM ACCURATE INFORMATION:
The despot rules by
fear, and the fearful tell the despot what he wants to hear - which is a
formula for disaster.
“You have an autocrat in power—or even now a
despot—making decisions completely by himself. Does he get input from others?...
Does he think he knows better than everybody else? … Does he believe his own
propaganda or his own conspiratorial view of the world? ….The information gets
worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become
fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential…The biggest surprise for
Putin, of course, was the West. All the nonsense about how the West is
decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world
and the rise of China, et cetera: all of that turned out to be bunk … Zelensky,
galvanized the West to remember who it was. And that shocked Putin! That’s the
miscalculation.”
WHAT IS THE WEST?
IT HAS BEEN AWAKENED:
We have been forced
to come together to stand up to Putin, and China needs to pay attention as
well.
“The West is a series of institutions and
values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not
Western. Japan is Western, but not European. “Western” means rule of law,
democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity,
pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we
sometimes take for granted. … And that West, which we expanded in the nineties,
in my view properly, through the expansion of the European Union and NATO, is revived now, and it has stood up to Vladimir Putin in a
way that neither he nor Xi Jinping expected.”
WHAT ABOUT THE
OLIGARCHS?
There can always be
a palace coup if things get bad enough, but maybe not from Putin’s oligarchs.
“The oligarchs were never in power under Putin.
He clipped their wings. They worked for him. If they didn’t work for him, they
could lose their money. ... Putin built a regime in which private property,
once again, was dependent on the ruler. Everybody knew this. If they didn’t
know, they learned the lesson the hard way.”
Maybe the Security Services and the upper Officer Corps can do it?
DESPOTIC CORRUPTION’S
SELF DESTRUCTION:
Systems built on
corruption rather than merit weaken over time.
“The regime became more and more corrupt, less
and less sophisticated, less and less trustworthy, less and less popular. It
hollowed out. That’s what happens with dictatorships…This is the thing about
authoritarian regimes: they’re terrible at everything. They can’t feed their
people. They can’t provide security for their people. They can’t educate their
people. But they only have to be good at one thing to survive. If they can deny
political alternatives, if they can force all opposition into exile or prison,
they can survive, no matter how incompetent or corrupt or terrible they are…You
have the denial of alternatives, the suppression of any opposition, arrest,
exile, and then you can prosper as an élite, not with economic growth but just
with theft. ..The problem is how to pay the patronage for their élites, how to
keep the élites loyal, especially the security services and the upper levels of
the officer corps. If money just gushes out of the ground in the form of
hydrocarbons or diamonds or other minerals, the oppressors can emancipate
themselves from the oppressed.... They can have zero economic growth and still
live very high on the hog.”
THE NECESSITY OF
PROPAGANDA:
The despot needs
propaganda stories to feed the masses to keep them from chopping his head
off. So Putin and his power structure
are very good at propaganda and disinformation (as America has learned the hard
way as Putin helped install a Putin puppet in the White House)
“We think of censorship as suppression of
information, but censorship is also the active promotion of certain kinds of
stories that will resonate with the people. The aspiration to be a great power,
the aspiration to carry out a special mission in the world, the fear and suspicion
that outsiders are trying to get them or bring them down: those are stories
that work in Russia. They’re not for everybody. You know many Russians who
don’t buy into that and know better. But the Putin version is powerful, and
they promote it every chance they get.”
IF YOUR MILITARY
FAILS, PULVERIZE ALL LIFE FROM AFAR:
The Russian
military has been stalled by incredible fighting by Ukrainian military and
civilian population. But, Putin is just sending in bombs, artillery shells, and
missiles from afar.
“…we
saw what Russian forces did to Grozny in 1999-2000; we saw what they did to Aleppo.
For Russia, if precision doesn’t work, they will decimate cities. That is what
we’re seeing now in Kharkiv and in other parts of Ukraine. And it’s only just
begun, potentially.”
UKRAINE CANNOT BE OCCUPIED:
Ukraine is a third the size of Russia and is
learning to hate Russia. They will never
be ruled successfully.
“Russia cannot successfully occupy Ukraine.
They do not have the scale of forces. They do not have the number of administrators
they’d need or the cooperation of the population. They don’t even have a
Quisling yet.
DEPSOTISM PROMOTES “TUPOI”
AND SPIRALS INTO MEDIOCRITY AND INCOMPETENCE:
Despots choose mediocre lackeys, not brilliant competitors.
“You have to remember that these regimes practice something called “negative selection.” You’re going to promote people to be editors, and you’re going to hire writers, because they’re talented; you’re not afraid if they’re geniuses. But, in an authoritarian regime, that’s not what they do. They hire people who are a little bit, as they say in Russian, tupoi, not very bright. They hire them precisely because they won’t be too competent, too clever, to organize a coup against them. Putin surrounds himself with people who are maybe not the sharpest tools in the drawer on purpose…Negative selection does protect the leader, but it also undermines his regime. (We saw this and see this in America as Trump, not the sharpest tool himself, surrounded himself with ever duller tools over time)
HOW DO WE GET OUT
OF THIS?
Biden is trying to
keep from escalating to maximalist responses and hoping that Putin can find a
face saving exit. I wish him luck.
“The problem now is not that the Biden
Administration made mistakes; it’s that it’s hard to figure out how to
de-escalate …The pressure is on to be maximalist on our side, but, the more you
corner them, the more there’s nothing to lose for Putin, the more he can raise
the stakes, unfortunately. He has many tools that he hasn’t used that can hurt
us. We need a de-escalation from the maximalist spiral, and we need a little bit
of luck and good fortune, perhaps in Moscow, perhaps in Helsinki or Jerusalem,
perhaps in Beijing, but certainly in Kyiv.”
It is very
dangerous when an authoritarian personality makes catastrophic mistakes. We see it played out pathetically in America
with an ex-president who has never ever ever ever admitted to a mistake (this
is a characteristic of a panicked adolescent who does not know how to grow up). Putin cannot admit to an error, it seems, out
of fear that he will be deposed and face criminal prosecution as a War
Criminal, or indeed be assassinated (or allowed to die of a “sudden disease” –
the way Stalin departed).
Prayer is
warranted. I insist on believing that goodness
and truth will prevail, and evil and stupidity will fail. I would not want to be in Putin’s shoes right
now, but it is the people of Ukraine that are the ones suffering this
catastrophic miscalculation of a delusional tryant.
