This state of affairs came to an abrupt end with Russia’s all-out invasion on 24 February 2022. Not only did the fighting reach deep into Ukraine’s heartland, but life far behind the frontline also became militarised. Russia frequently bombards civilian infrastructure as well as cities in a type of terror warfare intended to break the will of Ukraine’s defenders. There is no longer any hinterland.

How long will this slaughter last? In August last year I warned against overly optimistic expectations, writing that “supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support.” Another six months on it is even clearer that patience and endurance will be needed if we want to see Ukraine survive and strive. We have to stop thinking in terms of short and decisive campaigns. This war has become a war of attrition.

Like Vladimir Putin, we need to think in the geographical and historical categories of what historian Timothy Snyder has memorably called the “bloodlands” — the vast territories between Russia in the east and Germany in the west, with Ukraine in the middle. This viewpoint expands the time horizon dramatically. The last three wars fought in this region were far from short campaigns. The first world war’s “eastern front” lasted from August 1914 to March 1918. The wars of the Romanov succession began in Central Asia in 1916 and elsewhere in 1918, only ending, depending on the region, in 1920, 1921, 1922 or even 1923. The German Soviet war — constantly invoked by Putin both in the run-up to the war and during Russia’s continuing cultural mobilisation — extended from the (northern hemisphere) summer of 1941 to the spring of 1945.

Hence, the normal duration a full scale military conflict in this part of the world seems to be three to four years. Ukraine has survived two so far.

But it’s not just the region’s history that suggests a long haul. Once battle lines are fully entrenched, conventional war takes time. The first world war’s western front was bogged down in costly trench warfare, with massive casualties but little territorial gains, for four years.

By the time the second world war rolled around, military specialists in all armies had found the technical means to overcome trenches, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. And yet it took the Allies close to a year after the invasion of Normandy in 1944 to defeat Germany, a country under assault from the east by the steamroller of the Red Army, from the south by the United States, British Empire forces and the Free French, and from the air by indiscriminate attack by the combined power of the US and British air forces. Both Ukraine and Russia are in much stronger positions today.

Historical analogies are miserable predictors. But they matter when historical actors think in and through them. Putin is an avid reader of history, constantly pondering where he fits in. He thinks in categories and time-spans informed by Russia’s historical experience.

While he didn’t expect Ukraine to resist so effectively and survive the initial onslaught, he had long prepared his country for a drawn-out conflict with the outside world. One indicator is the effort his regime spent on making Russia’s food system relatively independent of outside supplies. At a time when everybody praised the virtues of globalisation and international networks of trade and mutual dependence, Putin insisted Russia should be able to feed itself.

As a recent study points out, this is the kind of food system you build when you expect a long-term confrontation that might throw your country back on its own resources. Putin embarked on it over decades, at a time when barely anybody in Europe could imagine a war of this magnitude on the continent.

Putin also entrenched his dictatorship, also an anticipation of war. First came the slide towards authoritarianism that began on the first day of his presidency. More recently came its acceleration. The death last week of opposition figure Alexei Navalny is just the latest escalation of a massive crackdown that began in 2021 and quickened with the start of the all-out war in 2022. Russia is now a full-blown dictatorship.

Thus entrenched in the Kremlin, Putin expects the democracies of Europe to have the shorter breath. The way Ukraine has become a political football in US domestic politics might well feed this expectation.

We need to appreciate that this is Putin’s theory of victory: to pound Ukraine with artillery and air attacks; to bleed the defenders white by sacrificing large numbers of his own citizens; and to wait until “the decadent West” loses interest and returns to business as usual, depriving Ukraine of the weapons and economic support it needs to defend itself.

As things stand, he might well be proven right. As I wrote a year ago about the then unlikely prospect of a Russian victory:

Winning the war would require Russia to ramp up its military production and mobilisation of manpower and increase the quality of its training and leadership. It could do that over the long run, just as the Soviet Union did during World War II… It could do so particularly if some of the countries which today are sitting on the fence decide to defy the United States, NATO and the European Union and circumvent or ignore sanctions; the United States reverts to isolationism; NATO disintegrates into squabbles between its members; and the European Union implodes among disagreements between old and new, and rich and less prosperous nations.

This pessimistic scenario has not yet come to pass. Yes, Russia currently has the whip hand. It has massively increased its armaments production, found ways around sanctions and continued to field large numbers of men while avoiding all-out mobilisation. Meanwhile, the United States has shaped up as the weakest link in the chain of democracies supporting Ukraine.

But Russia has not won yet. Ukraine still has “a viable theory of victory,” as two leading military analysts recently wrote. Its military has become expert at war by attrition, which it fights intelligently, minimising its own losses while maximising the enemy’s. Supplied adequately, it will become even better at this terrible art, denying Russia victory and eventually turning the tide.

For this to happen, though, Ukraine needs the continued support of the outside world: from NATO countries, from the Europeans and from friends further afield, such as Australia. But these friends need to appreciate that this war is now a war of attrition. And those wars are not won in a day or a season.

What about negotiations? A strong commitment to long-term support should unite all friends of Ukraine, no matter whether they think that ultimately the war will end in Kyiv’s forces retaking all occupied territories, if necessary by military means (the current official Ukrainian position), or in a negotiated settlement of some sort, with compromises on both sides.

There are indeed models for a negotiated peace which, while painful, might satisfy Ukraine and guarantee its safety rather than simply giving Russia breathing space to rearm for the next assault or the chance to insist on Ukraine’s unconditional capitulation. The much-discussed “West German” solution is one such proposal. It proposes that Ukraine be divided into a democratic west with some of its eastern territories occupied or even annexed by Russia. The west would be integrated into NATO and the European Union and developed with a massive aid program similar to the Marshall Plan. This is certainly not an acceptable solution for either side at the moment, but it might well become one once exhaustion eventually sets in.

The key term here is “eventually.” Negotiating now only aids Russia in its imperialist and anti-democratic goals. Forcing Ukraine to negotiate at a moment when, with delayed and insufficient support from its democratic friends, it is on the defensive amounts to asking a democratic nation to surrender to a dictatorship. Negotiations are best held from a position of strength. If not backed by the ability to resist and indeed to inflict damage, talks with a militarily stronger opponent quickly lead to a loss of territory and sovereignty.

The Ukrainians learned this lesson in 1918 when they signed the first treaty of Brest–Litovsk with the Germans and Austrians, who subsequently occupied the country and squeezed out food reserves to feed their own war effort. The Russian Bolsheviks learned the same lesson shortly thereafter, when, devoid of the fighting force they themselves helped dissolve, they had to sign a punishing peace with the Germans just to get out of a war they could no longer fight. And, in an instance of remarkable historical justice, the Germans learned the same lesson in 1919, when they could do nothing but sign the famously unfriendly Versailles treaty.

Ukraine needs to be helped to avoid such a situation and negotiate from the position of strength, if a negotiated settlement will indeed end this war. •

The post Russia’s war against Ukraine: a longer view appeared first on Inside Story.

Kurkov is right. Reading books about this war can have a soothing effect. Only once we look up from the pages that have captured our imagination are we propelled back to the awful knowledge that Russia’s war against Ukraine continues. Blood keeps flowing. People keep getting injured and killed. A country is being destroyed. There seems no end in sight.

Looking at the pages in front of them, historians have another experience as well. Trained to read for argument and to classify books into schools of thought, they begin to think about the books dealing with this war as part of its “historiography” — a corpus of texts engaged in a discussion with each other attempting to understand the past and its meaning for the present.

To see a historiography forming while the event it describes is still unfolding is unusual. Normally decades, even centuries, pass before historical schools solidify around a particular event. In this respect, the literature on Russia’s war against Ukraine resembles the historiography of Stalinism in its formative stages, but its historiographical schools are developing much faster in our present, pressurised environment.

Somewhat schematically, we can distinguish five schools of thought about the origins of this war. One group of writers sees the West at fault, and particularly NATO. Another blames Russia and the Russians, opponents of peace and democracy. A third group sees Russia’s imperialist past at the core of a war that expresses the legacy of a lost empire and the failure to overcome its culture. A fourth group, the intentionalists, focus on Vladimir Putin and his perhaps irrational, or at least idiosyncratic, motivation for waging war. A final group sees the war as a struggle between dictatorship and democracy reflected in Putin’s attempt to quash any potential challenge to his rule, at home or abroad. The war, on this reading, is part of Putin’s “preventive counter-revolution.”

There are, of course, combinations of these viewpoints. Blaming NATO can go together with a notion of Russia’s ongoing imperialism: given the latter, the argument goes, NATO should have abstained even more emphatically from expanding into Russia’s supposed backyard. Russia’s imperialism and continued quest for a great power status can be linked, in turn, to its hostility to Ukraine’s quest for democracy. Intentionalists, too, can see Putin as drawing on a wider Russian culture of imperialism, which can go hand in glove with a quest for dictatorship and therefore preventive counter-revolution.

Perhaps the most well-defined position in the debate on the war’s origins is the first: blaming NATO for provoking the conflict by expanding into Russia’s “sphere of influence.” This path has been taken most prominently by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. As critics of this view have pointed out, it has its history backwards. It was not when NATO enlarged into Eastern Europe that Russia became aggressive but when it showed weakness — by failing to agree on a response to the accession hopes of Georgia and Ukraine at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, for example. Moreover, it is difficult to see Putin’s aggression, “riddled” as it is with “irrationalities,” as some kind of logical response to a putative Western threat.

NATO-blaming has recently lost some of its dominance over public discourse. But it continues to be popular on the far left, sometimes amended to an opposition to both Russian and NATO imperialism. Beyond the extremes lingers the view that, whatever bad things happen in the world, “the West” must be to blame.

Historian Philipp Ther is clearly affected by such sensibilities. He feels “comfortable” in the company of “leftists,” he writes in the introduction to his latest book, and he feels that “the West” (whatever that might be) has lost its way. The multiple crises we encounter today, including the war against Ukraine, are part of a “wrong turn” in economic policy after 1989–91. “The West lost the peace” after the end of the cold war, he says, because it became self-satisfied and embraced unfettered capitalism (or “neoliberalism,” defined as the conglomerate of “liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, the reduction of state influence on the economy, and global financial capitalism”).

NATO expansion, then, is not at the centre of Ther’s argument in How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War. A social historian, Ther is much more interested in political economy than international relations. He flags in his introduction that he feels uneasy about NATO expansion, and at one point suggests Russia should have joined the alliance. But he hastens to add that his critique is “absolutely not meant to relativise Russia’s attack on Ukraine.” The latter “deserves the full support of the West and the entire world — otherwise Russia’s pursuit of a multipolar world order with a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe will instead lead to maximum global disorder.”

Elsewhere in his book, Ther declares Russia’s enduring “imperial legacy” to be the core cause of the war. The early 1990s might have been a moment to cast off the legacy, but it passed, first because of Boris Yeltsin’s shelling of a recalcitrant (and imperialist) parliament in 1993 and then because of the rouble crisis in 1998, “when most of the Russian middle class sank into poverty again.” The latter is something of an overstatement, as a middle class continued to exist thereafter, but Ther’s overall point is well taken: “Neither of these traumatic moments had anything to do with the expansion of NATO or the EU; they were domestic problems first and foremost.”

Rather than an outcome of international relations, Russia’s trials and tribulations were part of the global malaise Ther is exploring. His great bugbear is the failed prophet of the “end of history,” Francis Fukuyama, whom he sees as the chief ideologist of Western triumphalism; his intellectual hero is the sociologist Karl Polanyi, analyst of the “great transformation” of the long nineteenth century.

Like Polanyi in the interwar years, Ther argues, we find ourselves at the tail end of another transformative period: the one that ran from 1989 to 2022. This transformation had two aspects — post-Soviet transformation in the former Soviet empire and “late-capitalist transformation in the West” — and they were held together by a shared framework of “neoliberal globalisation.”

Far from being the end of history, this period was one of profound economic, social and political upheaval, with winners and losers dotted around the globe, both between countries and within them. The claim that unfettered capitalism would somehow lift all the boats, making us all more prosperous, happy and democratic, turned out to be a pipedream at best and ideological obfuscation at worst.

Instead came the global financial crisis, followed by the annus horribilis of 2016, with Donald Trump’s victory in the United States and the Brexiteers’ in Britain. Then the “one-two punch of the pandemic and the biggest war in Europe since 1945… brought to an end the era for which historians have not yet found a name.” In line with Polanyi, Ther proposes calling the period from 1989 to 2022 “the age of transformation.”

Transformation to what? We don’t yet know, but it might not be good. Overall, Ther is quite pessimistic, but he does hope that his exploration of the history of our present will help open up “new opportunities for a progressive politics and society,” a political thrust that fits in well with other recent attempts to reconstruct the social democratic project for the twenty-first century.

To Ther, this is an existential quest. Like the unfettered capitalism of the nineteenth century, he fears that the new age of transformation might lead to some kind of fascism. The pendulum, to use his metaphor, having swung all the way towards a neoliberal abandonment of state protection, is now swinging back the other way. But Ther’s pendulum, in a hard-to-visualise twist, can swing in two ways: “left towards democratic socialism, or right towards fascism.”

Does any of this explain the war against Ukraine? Not really. Ther struggles to make Russia and Ukraine fit his explanatory scheme. True, the economic crisis triggered by Gorbachev’s reforms and deepened by the breakdown of the Soviet Union “plunged much of Russia’s population into destitution and misery,” which is never a good foundation for a democratic polity. But the same was true for Ukraine, which became democratic. And while Ukraine’s economy remained sluggish, Russia’s has grown by leaps and bounds since Putin came to power.

Neoliberalism, then, is of little use as a scapegoat for Russia’s aggression. Instead, Ther evokes a combination of the preventive counter-revolution argument and the anti-imperialist paradigm. Putin’s goal, he argues, is “to rewrite the end of history — with the creation of a new Russian empire.” The “larger dimensions of the conflict” also include the confrontation between “an authoritarian system” (Russia) that has evolved into a “hard dictatorship since Putin’s second term,” on the one side, and a country (Ukraine) that “has continually moved in the direction of liberal democracy ever since the Orange Revolution, and especially since 2014.”

Ukraine is far more democratic than Hungary, an EU member. Its governments have repeatedly transitioned smoothly and peacefully after elections, “something that unfortunately cannot be said for the USA since the storming of the Capitol.” Putin’s war on Ukraine is “also a war on democracy,” Ther writes, a “declaration of war against the EU and a free Europe.”

By evoking imperialism, a global transformation of capitalism, and a systemic confrontation between dictatorship and democracy, Ther avoids the position of authors who find the origins of this war in Russia’s national character, its history or its culture. I have argued elsewhere against such views as ahistoric and simplistic. Mikhail Zygar’s recent magnum opus War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance, can serve as evidence of some of their shortcomings: it is the book of a Russian democrat, a Russian anti-imperialist and a Russian enemy of this war. Were the arguments about Russia’s national character as militaristic, imperialist and anti-democratic correct, he should not exist. And yet he wrote a book — a long and eloquent one at that.

Zygar is a Russian intellectual, and he knows it. And he’s an anti-imperialist. His book is framed as a long letter to his Ukrainian friend Nadia, at whose house in Bucha — the scene of one of this war’s massacres — he wrote much of his earlier book, All the Kremlin’s Men. “Nadia no longer speaks to me,” he writes in distress. “Because I am Russian, she considers me an ‘imperialist.’” He hopes his book will change her mind, and the minds of his compatriots: “Nadia, I am not an imperialist, and I am writing this book so that others will not be either.”

War and Punishment is made up of two, very different, parts. In fact, it is two books pressed into one volume. The first is a series of historical essays on major moments in Ukrainian–Russian relations that have been turned into myths in both Russian and Ukrainian historiography. They include Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s ill-fated alliance with Muscovy against Poland in 1654, which Russian historians have used to claim that Ukraine voluntarily subjugated itself under Moscow’s tsars; Ivan Mazepa’s alliance with Sweden against Peter the Great in 1708, which was declared a “betrayal” by Russian imperialists; Catherine the Great’s destruction of the remnants of Cossack Freedom; the life and work of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet of the nineteenth century; the Ukrainian revolution and Ukraine’s independent state at the end of the first world war; the Great Famine, or Holodomor, of the early 1930s; and nationalist resistance against German and Soviet occupation during the second world war.

Zygar provides a fresh and readable account of the historical background of each of these episodes and how they persist as anti-Ukrainian myths in Russian historiography.

Like anti-Russian authors, then, Zygar is well aware of the imperialist mainstream of Russian culture. His book is an attempt both to condemn it and to reconstruct, or strengthen, its anti-imperialist counter-current. Like anti-fascist German intellectuals after 1933, and for similar reasons, he is scathing about the culture in which he grew up:

Many Russian writers and historians are complicit in facilitating this war. It is their words and thoughts over the past 350 years that sowed the seeds of Russian fascism and allowed it to flourish, although many would be horrified today to see the fruits of their labour. We failed to spot just how deadly the very idea of Russia as a “great empire” was… We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, “great Russian culture” belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them.

But his reaction is not to treat Russia as some kind of historical anomaly but to change what it means to be a Russian. “Russia as an empire has been consigned to the past, as a direct and irreversible consequence of the war,” he writes. What remains, however, is imperialism, a mindset, an emotional state, that needs to change, not just because of what it does to others, but also because of how it deforms Russia and the Russians:

Imperial history is our disease; it’s inherently addictive. And the withdrawal symptoms will hurt. But this is inevitable. We have to return to reality and realise what we’ve done.

We have to learn this lesson. To stop believing in our own uniqueness. To stop being proud of our vast territory. To stop thinking we’re special. To stop imagining ourselves as the centre of the world, its conscience, its source of spirituality. It’s all bunk.

Decolonising the Russian mind means democratising the country. Or, put the other way, democratisation can only succeed with the defeat of the imperialist mindset, which legitimises the subjugation of citizens as subjects:

We must strip the state of the right to impose its own view of the past on us. We have to roll up our sleeves and completely reinterpret our history, or rather the history of the peoples who fell victim to the empire…

Looking back, we see a horrific sight; our ancestors, indoctrinated to believe they were victors, were themselves victims. They were forced to kill, to rejoice in the killing, to take pride in the killing. And they were good at it. They were proud; they got high; they wrote beautiful poems, songs, and books glorifying blood and violence, the crunching of bones. And they forgot it was their own blood, their own bones.

This position is a radical departure from Russian liberal thought, both past and present, which often remained deeply imperialist (and racist), while espousing individual autonomy and democratic governance for Russians. At the same time it builds on anti-imperial Russian thinkers and the work of critical historians working, for example, in the now illegal organisation Memorial.

The second part of Zygar’s book is very different. It tells an integrated story, with a huge number of characters, reminiscent of the big Russian novels the title alludes to. This story begins in 1991 and ends in the present. While readers with little background in Russian and Ukrainian history will benefit greatly from the punchy and often inspired historical vignettes of the first part, they will likely get lost in the details of the second. It provides political history in its purest form: a tangled web of personalities and the relations between them; a history of power, corruption, loyalty and betrayal; and a history of powerful men and women: politicians and powerbrokers, oligarchs and gangsters, businesspeople and soldiers. In between, we learn about the unlikely rise of the comedian-turned-politician-turned-wartime-leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

This focus on personalities, their relations and the complex history of events over three decades — the same decades covered by Ther’s great transformation — sits somewhat uneasily with the framing of the book as an exploration of Russian imperialism. Given that many actors in Ukraine also pursued their own interests, connected to Russia as much as to Ukraine, the emergent story of oligarchic politics is much more messy than the subtitle of the book suggests: this is not just a story of Russian oppression and Ukrainian resistance.

When it comes to explaining the outbreak of the all-out war in 2022, Zygar is an intentionalist: the fourth emergent school of the history of this war. Intentionalists focus on the decision-makers and their motives. My own recent book, informed in many ways by Zygar’s earlier work, was intentionalist in this regard: while I saw, again like Zygar, Russian imperialism as one of the underlying structural causes, I also argued that the timing of the invasion becomes intelligible only when we understand that Putin, his seventieth birthday approaching, was looking for a legacy. He had spent the Covid years in splendid isolation, stewing in his own juices and reading Russian imperialist history. He wanted to get into the history books as an empire builder alongside Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Stalin.

Zygar tells a similar story, but he sees Putin driven less by his own historical ambition than by domestic politics. Spooked by the failed Belarusian revolution of 2020–21, the Russian president decided to remove the most prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. Putin’s agents poisoned Navalny on 20 August 2020 but the attempt on his life failed. Evacuated to Germany, Navalny launched a counterattack: a YouTube video with the results of his team’s investigation into the poisoning, which was watched by some twenty million people at the time.

Navalny returned to Russia on 17 January 2021, triggering anti-regime protests and his own arrest. Two days later his team released a video about a private palace owned by Putin on the Black Sea coast. “This revelation,” writes Zygar, “strikes perhaps the most powerful blow to Putin during his entire reign. The video is watched by 120 million people, that is, almost the entire adult population of Russia.” Demonstrations have to be clubbed out of existence “Belarus-style.” The “damage to Putin’s credibility is colossal,” and he fears losing control. It is in this context, Zygar argues, that Putin’s administration is beginning to hatch new war plans: Ukraine can serve as the successful little war that saves Putin’s rule.

This is why Putin returns to history and, with the help of his former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, writes his notorious July 2021 essay on the alleged historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians — the historical treatise that part one of Zygar’s book is trying to counter. It is a historical justification for the coming war, but not its origin. The origin is the attempt to forestall revolution at home.

Here, then, Zygar partakes of the final emerging school of thought on the origins of this war: that it is an attempt at preventive counter-revolution. As the Australian political scientist Robert Horvath has argued, Putin has long attempted to immunise his regime against the “colour revolutions” that seemed to be breaking out periodically both in Russia’s immediate vicinity and further afield.

One way to link this anti-revolutionary quest to aggression against Ukraine is to see Ukraine as a vibrant democracy at Russia’s doorstep and hence an example of what could be for the domestic opposition. The problem with this interpretation is that there was no renewed democratic revolution in Kyiv in 2022, and hence no reason to quash it.

Zygar’s interpretation is closer to Horvath’s original reading: Putin went to war not because Ukraine posed a democratic threat to his rule but because he faced a democratic threat at home. The war was a distraction: an attempt to reignite the imperialist jingoism of the Crimea annexation of 2014 that propelled Putin’s approval ratings upwards.

Two interpretive problems remain. For one, Putin didn’t order the invasion when he needed the distraction but well after the domestic crisis had passed. The 2021 protests were well and truly over by the time he published his Ukraine manifesto in the middle of that year. By early 2022, when he sent in his troops, there was no challenge to his regime.

Second, as Zygar documents himself, the war plans were hatched in secret. If the regime as a whole was under threat and the war was part of an attempt to prevent revolution, it is hardly credible that even Putin’s closest advisers were not aware of the war plans even at the eve of the invasion.

Be that as it may: Putin’s invasion on 24 February 2022 started a new historical epoch. As Ther points out, that might well be true for the globe as a whole but it is certainly true for Russia and Ukraine. At the centre of this new epoch is the war, its history being written as events unfold.

We already have military history in the more narrow sense of the term: an appreciation of unfolding events at the frontline; analyses of the technical aspects of the fighting, the evolution of tactics and weaponry; and a focus on what lessons professional soldiers can learn from this fighting. More readable for non-specialists are initial narrative accounts of this war. Among the steady stream of these, some are penned by historians but more by journalists. The latest addition is Andrew Harding’s A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine, an account of the battle of Voznesensk in March 2022.

Harding’s slim volume is a gem. A masterpiece of journalistic storytelling, it has the qualities of a good novella. It may be the most readable book about this war published to date. Based on interviews with some dozen survivors of the battle — soldiers and civilians, men and women, Russians and Ukrainians — the book tells a tale of survival and resistance on Ukraine’s side as well as aggression and frustration on Russia’s. It also explores the sometimes unclear loyalties, and indeed identities, of both Russians and Ukrainians, and doesn’t shy away from unsentimental depictions of war crimes.

Harding’s book thus explores some of the complexities of the real history of this war without falling into relativism: it is clear that Harding’s sympathies are with the defenders rather than the aggressors and that he doesn’t find it difficult to distinguish between the two. He leaves us with the despondent nightmares of his interviewees. They are haunted, he writes, “by the notion that this conflict may never end, and by the fear that Russia’s capacity to absorb suffering and its unflinching willingness to continue inflicting it will eventually enable it to grind out some kind of victory.”

As Ther warns, such an outcome would be catastrophic. It can be avoided if Ukraine’s friends in what is left of the democratic world stay the course. The biggest threat to Ukraine’s independence today derives from phantasies that this war might be stopped if Russia were to be accommodated by reasonable diplomacy. As Zygar notes, Russia in its current configuration cannot be accommodated. Defeat, not victory, might set Russia on the path Zygar proclaims with grim optimism: “Future generations of Russians will remember with horror and shame the war that Putin unleashed. They will marvel at how archaic hubris came to dominate the minds of twenty-first-century people. And they will not tread the same path if we, their ancestors, bear the punishment today.” •

How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War
By Philipp Ther | Translated by Jessica Spengler | Polity Press | $36.95 | 304 pages

War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance
By Mikhail Zygar | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | $34.95 | 424 pages

A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine
By Andrew Harding | Bonnier | $32.99 | 160 pages

The post Writing the history of the present appeared first on Inside Story.

Its population was ethnically mixed but with a strong dominance of Ukrainians, who made up 73 per cent of the people. Russians constituted a significant minority of 22 per cent, followed by people identifying as Jews, Belarusians and Moldavians, all making up just under one in a hundred. Other nationalities of the Soviet empire, from Bulgarians and Poles to Azeri, Koreans, Germans, Kyrgyz and Lithuanians, made up the remaining 3 per cent.

Regional differences in political outlook were strong. Although all regions voted in favour of separating from the Soviet Union in the December 1991 referendum, some were more enthusiastic than others. In Lviv, in the west of the country, 95 per cent of the people voted and 97 per cent of them approved the declaration of independence, which had been made in late August in response to the coup attempt in Moscow. In Crimea, an ethnically strongly Russian region at the other extreme, only 68 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls, with 54 per cent of them voting in favour.

Donetsk, an industrial region in the east of the country with strong economic ties to Russia, stood somewhat between these extremes. There, 77 per cent registered their vote and 84 per cent of those people voted for independence.

With the partial exception of the three Baltic republics, all post-Soviet nations have struggled with three interrelated crises: a crisis of democracy, an economic crisis and corruption. Outside the three Baltic outliers (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), the relatively well-performing Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are all resource-exporting economies. Everybody else is struggling.

In terms of wealth per person (measured by GDP per capita), Russia is about at the level of China (US$10,500), while even the rich Baltic countries are nowhere near the United States (US$63,500) or Australia (US$51,800).

The comparative poverty of the region is partly a legacy of the Soviet economy’s poor performance, and partly a hangover from the economic catastrophe of the 1990s. In Ukraine, agriculture continued to be run by the disastrously unproductive collective and state farms until 2000. Other economic reforms were also slow in coming.

Meanwhile, the unravelling of the integrated Soviet imperial economy, the economic burden of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, ageing and inefficient equipment, and dependence on Russian oil and gas were problematic legacies.

Moreover, Ukraine’s state apparatus had controlled no more than 5 per cent of Ukraine’s GDP before 1990 (the rest was under the direct control of Moscow). Officials thus “lacked the experience necessary to take quick and effective control” of the economy, as the writer Marco Bojcun puts it. The quick expansion of the share of the economy controlled by Ukraine’s officials — reaching 40 per cent on the eve of independence — only added to the problems.

Together, these issues combined to create a disaster: between 1991 and 1996, Ukraine’s economy contracted every year by at least 10 per cent and as much as 23 per cent. Overall, it had contracted to 43 per cent of its 1990 level by 1996 — a decline worse than the United States experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The main reason nobody starved after 1991 was similar to Russia’s: the existence of private gardening, a legacy of the Soviet period. “The overwhelming majority of workers have out of town kitchen gardens,” wrote a worker from the Dnipro region in 1996. These were “little patches of land given them by the factory management under an agreement with the agricultural authorities… People work five days in the factories and two days on their plots.” According to official statistics, by 1996 some 80–95 per cent of fruit, vegetables and potatoes came from such plots. Even a quarter of all livestock were raised in private gardens.

Ukraine’s economy has not recovered nearly as much as that of resource-rich Russia, and its economic growth has stagnated since 2009. Russia’s war by proxy in Donbas since 2014 again stunted economic growth: between 2013 and 2015, Ukraine’s GDP halved.

The current war will have catastrophic consequences for this overall picture. In early 2022, the World Bank predicted a contraction of the economy by 45 per cent. In the same year, 47 per cent of surveyed Ukrainians reported that they did not have “enough money even for food” or had money sufficient “only for the most basic items.”

Post-Soviet countries are not only poor, they are also among the world’s most corrupt. Among European countries, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are all known as deeply corrupt societies. Of the 336 politicians whose secret offshore financial accounts were leaked in the “Pandora Papers” of 2021, thirty-eight came from Ukraine, among them president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This was the largest number of any country in the world. Russia’s figure was nineteen.

Over time, however, Ukraine has improved its record. In Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a higher score means less corruption. Ukraine initially improved significantly after 2004. While this progress was undone after a few years, improvement has been steady since 2009. Meanwhile, Russia has stagnated since 2012 and is classified today as more corrupt than its neighbour.

Corruption and economic crisis do little to embed democracy. Maybe unsurprisingly, then, the majority of the societies that succeeded the Soviet Union are ruled by authoritarian regimes. (Nine out of fifteen of them, or 60 per cent, according to the 2021 classification by Freedom House, an organisation that measures democratic performance.) Only the three Baltic states, which are members of both NATO and the European Union, are classified as consolidated democracies. Three others, Ukraine among them, are hybrid regimes, where authoritarian elements compete with democratic ones.

Within this general context, Ukraine is doing relatively well. Between 2017 and 2022 it was classified as “partly free” by Freedom House, its score oscillating between 60 and 62 on a scale out of 100, where the higher number indicates a higher level of civic and political liberty. Such numbers do not indicate that Ukraine is a beacon of democracy, however, either in the region (where Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia stand out as the freest countries, with scores of between 89 and 90) or around the world (the troubled United States scored 83 in 2021, while Australia stood at 97).

But Ukraine contrasts positively with Russia, which has been categorised as “not free” with a score of 20, falling to 19 in 2022. And Vladimir Putin’s state, in turn, still compares favourably with other dictatorships in the region, which are even more repressive: Belarus with 11 and Tajikistan with 8. For comparison, China scored 9 in 2021 and North Korea 3.

To a significant extent, the predominance of authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space is a Soviet legacy. “In all parts of the former Soviet empire,” write two legal scholars who studied this problem in detail, “the socialist party-state structure left a shared legacy of an executive-dominated state.” Change depended on whether a postcolonial or neocolonial mindset won the day.

In other words: did people want to stay in the Russian orbit or not? If not, the obvious choice was an orientation towards Europe, which came with mixed constitutions stressing checks and balances, weakening the executive; if yes, the constitution would be modelled much more closely on Russia’s “crown presidentialism,” further entrenching the centrality of the executive. In Ukraine, the former tendency won out, but not without political struggles.

One rather basic aspect of democracy is that governments are changed peacefully by elections. Ukraine is doing quite well in this regard, particularly if compared with its two autocratic neighbours. In Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko has been in power since 1994; in Russia, Putin since 1999. Ukraine, meanwhile, has seen seven presidencies since 1991: of Leonid Kravchuk (1991–94), Leonid Kuchma (1994–2005), Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10), Viktor Yanukovych (2010–14), Oleksandr Turchynov (2014), Petro Poroshenko (2014–19) and now Volodymyr Zelenskyy (since 2019).

The majority of these presidents were elected to office and left when they lost elections or decided not to contest them. Two were removed through revolutions, one peaceful (the Orange Revolution of 2004–05), one violent (the Revolution of Dignity, or Euromaidan, of 2013–14). But both revolutions resulted in elected governments again, not the imposition of revolutionary dictatorships.

Ukraine’s presidents ruled in competition with parliament, at first the one elected under Soviet conditions in 1990, then, since 1994, a post-Soviet one. This competition was formalised in the 1996 constitution, which put the directly elected president next to a one-chamber parliament that limited presidential powers to a much larger extent than in Russia.

Its unusually strong parliament became an issue because of the fragmented party system, however. First, there were too many parties; second, the existing parties were not based around major ideological positions or clearly elaborated political philosophies; third, there were many socially influential groups competing for power. As one observer puts it, this system was based “not on ideological factors, but on the competition of financial and industrial groups and regional elites” interested “in dispersing power in order to control at least a small segment of it.” The result was “political instability.”

Ukraine’s political system, then, constituted something of a unique case, both within the post-Soviet space and in the world at large. Its huge number of parties — more than 120 were officially registered in 2002 — were often internally divided as well. In the words of one observer, this fragmentation was “unprecedented for a modern democratic republic.” For another, it “hindered democratisation” by making it “difficult for the population to orient itself politically.” But the diversity also made it more difficult for would-be autocrats and their networks of clients to consolidate power.

The same can be said for the much-quoted regional fragmentation of Ukraine. On the one hand, regionalism has defined voting behaviour and hence fragmented the political system. In both parliamentary and presidential elections until 2019, voters in the more Russian and Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine and Crimea voted for one set of parties, while those in the more Ukrainian-speaking western Ukraine preferred a different set. “No party managed to elect candidates across Ukraine,” writes political scientist Paul D’Anieri. Presidential elections show a similar regional pattern.

At their extreme, regional divisions can define conflict lines within Ukraine, including the threat of secessionism and ethno-political conflict. On the other hand, regional identities and political networks also help balance power within the broader political system and prevent any one group of elites from monopolising power. Ukraine’s regional, cultural, religious and economic diversity can be seen as an asset as much as a liability. For historian Serhii Plokhy, it is “one of the main reasons for Ukraine’s success as a democracy.”

Of the three main regional power groups, one is based in Kharkiv in the northeast; the second in the industrial heartland around Donetsk in the east; and the third in Dnipro in central Ukraine, the heart of the Soviet Union’s defence and space industries. These were already part of the political structure of late Soviet times, and they led to a specific form of “patronal democracy” in which clans competed for political power within a republican set-up.

At the same time, winners often tried to replace this competitive structure with a single hierarchy of power. The first attempt came under Leonid Kuchma, who built a “patronal autocracy,” but the Orange Revolution of 2004 destroyed this system and reverted to dual competition between president and parliament on the one hand and multiple power networks on the other.

Yanukovych then tried again, and successfully neutralised competing clans — until ordinary citizens intervened to stop this usurpation of power. The 2013–14 Revolution of Dignity not only undid Yanukovych’s dictatorial slide but also led to an election labelled by two experts as “probably the fairest one in the country’s history.” This transformation of the political system was one-sided, however: while it did constitute a redemocratisation, it didn’t eliminate regional and patronal politics.

It was only with Zelenskyy’s election in 2019 that things began to change in this regard. Zelenskyy was “no chief patron and [had] no patronal pyramid” but instead gathered strong support from the new middle and creative classes, campaigning on an anti-corruption platform. He mostly spoke Russian during his campaign, which helped overcome regional differences between Russian speakers in the east and Ukrainian speakers in the west. He achieved what many thought impossible: his election was the first in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history where voting did not follow regional patterns. •

This is an edited extract from Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story, published this month by Melbourne University Press.

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In Russia, what was already an increasingly autocratic regime has ramped up its repression and increasingly shrill propaganda to such an extent that some informed observers are viewing it as fascist. In Ukraine, Kyiv’s second big counteroffensive is under way, but the enemy troops have dug in and are fighting hard to hold on to the territories they managed to occupy in 2022. The counteroffensive is making progress, but it is agonisingly slow.

NATO’s decision to promise membership to Ukraine — but only once the war is over — has perversely increased Russia’s incentive to continue fighting, especially with the possibility of a Trump victory in next year’s American election. The longer Russia maintains its aggression, the longer Ukraine remains outside NATO; a Trump presidency might well herald a fracturing of support for Ukraine among its allies. And as long as Putin remains in power, and as long as his army can sustain the ongoing significant losses, Russia is likely to remain in the war.

Along the way, analysts have got many things wrong. From predicting Russia wouldn’t attack (just before it did), to assuming a quick breakdown of Ukraine’s defences and disintegration of its government, to making optimistic predictions about the instability of Putin’s regime: real developments continued to confound the futurology so prevalent in the commentary.

I mustn’t exclude myself from this critique. A month into the conflict, I published a short piece outlining possible scenarios about how this war would end. Like others, I couldn’t imagine the conflict still raging a year and a half later. Like others, I underestimated Russia’s economic resilience in the face of sanctions (although the full impact of these measures is only being felt now). “Given the sanctions regime,” I wrote, Russia will retain the capacity to resupply its troops for “months at best.” That was way off the mark.

I did better with the scenarios I offered. The first was escalation, by which I meant a tactical nuclear strike or, worse, a nuclear attack on NATO. I didn’t think that was terribly likely, but I wasn’t confident enough to rule it out altogether. Luckily, I was right. While such a course of action remains a possibility, sabre-rattling rather than action has so far prevailed.

The escalations we have seen, however, are significant. The blowing up of the Kakhovka dam caused catastrophic environmental damage and human and material losses for Ukraine. The heavy use of landmines will contaminate the country for years, and maybe decades, to come. And the continual air and artillery attacks on civilian targets are degrading Ukraine’s infrastructure and kill or maim its people in significant numbers.

But Russia’s most consequential escalation has been in the sphere of trade: its continuing attempts to shut down Ukraine’s grain exports are an open attempt to hold the world hostage with the threat of famine.

In effect, what we have seen is my second scenario playing out. “Russia,” I wrote, “will destroy as much of Ukraine’s military and civilian infrastructure as possible, broaden attacks on civilians to increase the costs of this war for the government of Ukraine, and threaten nuclear war against anybody who wants to intervene.”

The point of this brutality was to push Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy “to the limit of what he thinks his people can endure.” Thus far, however, neither Zelenskyy nor Ukraine’s population as a whole has cracked under the pressure. Instead, the defenders have become further embittered and many of their friends abroad increasingly convinced that support for Ukraine is essential.

On the other side of the frontline, too, Putin acted as I feared: he persisted in his war and escalated it considerably.

Back in March 2022, I saw some signs that both sides might be willing to bring the conflict to an end through negotiations. Such optimism has fully evaporated. After the liberation of Bucha in April last year and the detection of appalling war crimes committed by the occupiers, negotiations with Russia before a complete withdrawal is politically impossible. And it is now clear, anyway, that Russia was never really interested in negotiations.

With the battle of Kyiv lost by April 2022, one of Putin’s options was to annex the occupied regions in Ukraine’s east and south, and dig in his troops and declare victory in an attempt to save face at home and blame the ongoing war on Ukraine. He did the former, including in territories his troops don’t control. But he didn’t do the latter. He has clearly no intention of exiting this war.

I ended that piece last year with the least likely scenario: that “Putin’s long-suffering underlings would stage a coup against him.” No such thing happened, of course. Instead, the political elite rallied around Putin, who continued to be the final arbiter of their squabbling. The spectacularly bizarre Wagner uprising was not, as sometimes suggested, an attack on Putin and his system but rather an attempt by one player to elevate his own position, protect himself from competitors and prevent the integration of his lucrative private army into the state’s military. Its resolution reflects a paramilitarised regime in which the state’s monopoly of violence is threatened but not destroyed.

That analysts, journalists, pundits and scholars have often failed to predict the course of this war isn’t surprising. No predictive science exists to be called on, and historical analogies are a poor guide to the complexities of quickly evolving situations. We should therefore be careful not to get ahead of ourselves. Assumptions that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is already doomed, that the Wagner mutiny is a sign that Putin’s grip on power is seriously shaken, or that Russia’s disintegration is just around the corner — all these might well end up on the long list of wrong predictions this war has generated. They might also turn out to be right, of course, but making policy decisions on the basis of such shaky expectations is foolhardy.

At this stage in the conflict, too much is still up in the air. Some time is still left in this year’s fighting season. The extent to which Ukraine’s armed forces have managed to seriously degrade Russia’s military capability at the frontline might not yet be evident. New weapons are still arriving, bolstering Ukraine’s fighting potential. What’s going on inside the Kremlin is opaque, with outside observers having difficulty discerning whether a serious crisis of power is brewing.

Rather than dreaming of some magical diplomatic solution, a sudden victory by Ukraine or a sudden disintegration of Russia to bring this war to a quick end, supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support while carefully and probably secretly planning for all contingencies. •

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Wasserstein has poured an extraordinary amount of research into this book. The bibliography lists thirty-four archives in seven countries (Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Israel, Britain and the United States) alongside oral history interviews, written testimonies, websites, unpublished doctoral dissertations, official publications from Austria, Britain, the United States and the Vatican, and a long list of published books and articles. These materials were assembled, read and digested over three decades of “digging ever deeper into what turned out to be an immense historical quarry.”

During his research, the historian built up “vast data banks of official records, newspaper dispatches, census materials, registers of births, marriages and deaths, electoral results, medical reports, maps and photographs, as well as meteorological, geological, ecological, ornithological, architectural, judicial, military, ecclesiastical and every other category of information I could find.”

Wasserstein’s biographical database alone includes information about “over seventeen thousand persons” who once lived in the small Galician town of Krakowiec (pronounced Krah-KOV-yets), the place where his grandparents were born and where, together with their daughter, they were shot at the end of the second world war.

With all this material, he could have produced a turgid multi-volume history of the town of his ancestors. At the very least, he could have written one of those doorstoppers commercial publishers somehow believe “the general public” has time to read. Thankfully, however, he has instead written a short and eminently readable account.

Wasserstein’s readers might recently have encountered Krakowiec — or Krakovets, as it is called today in Ukrainian — just across the border from Poland, in reporting about the refugee crisis created by Russia’s aggression. Founded sometime in the early fourteenth century, the town started life as a frontier settlement of the Kingdom of Poland. When Poland was partitioned in 1772, it became part of the Austrian-ruled Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. As it grew and became more prosperous, it turned from a Polish settlement into an increasingly Jewish town — a shtetl.

The Jewishness of the town was typical. In Galicia, landowners tended to be Polish aristocrats, the peasants were mostly Ruthenians (some of whom, by the nineteenth century, began to call themselves “Ukrainians”), and the town dwellers — tradesmen, tavern keepers, money lenders, and shop owners — were Jews. The division of labour was both functional and conflictual: its violent potential would be enhanced in the age of nationalism, racism and total war.

Wasserstein uses the history of this interaction between Poles, Ruthenians and Jews — and eventually a variety of invading military forces — to situate his own family’s history. He is not the first historian of East European Jewish heritage to embark on such a project. Shimon Redlich, in Together and Apart in Brzezany (2002), was among the earliest; most recently, that celebrated historian of the Holocaust, Omer Bartov, did something similar for another Galician town, Buczacz, in Anatomy of a Genocide (2019).

These accounts belong to a broader but relatively new genre of history writing: the transnational history of Eastern Europe. In books like Sketches from a Secret War (2005) and The Red Prince (2010), Timothy Snyder used the fate of individuals to chart new historical grounds between established national narratives. In A Biography of No Place (2005), Kate Brown presented an intimate portrait of how the borderland between Poland and Russia became a “Soviet heartland.”

At times of war, when national narratives are hardening, such books provide important correctives between and beyond national and nationalist history-telling. In each of them, the first world war plays a pivotal role.

As happened elsewhere in the region, that war came to Krakowiec as “a sudden, direct, and shattering blow.” The “unrelieved terror and carnage” it unleashed lasted not just four but seven years: it prompted the dissolution of both the Austro-Hungarian and the Romanov empires, and transformed seamlessly into a civil war and wars between successor states over real estate and the peoples of the fallen empires.

These years left “a residue of vicious collective suspicions and hatreds,” writes Wasserstein. “Ordinary human relationships collapsed into dog-eat-dog ruthlessness. The people of Krakowiec were plunged overnight into a dark realm. Their world would never be the same again.”

In this maelstrom, all sides distrusted the Jews: the Austrians no less than the Poles (who were soon in charge of their own state); the Russians of the Tsar no less than the Red Cavalry that came later from Soviet Russia to “liberate” the region from the “Polish lords” and the “capitalists” (the Jewish shopkeepers, mill owners and money lenders). Although the revolutionary Ukrainian state, formed in 1917 and declared independent in 1918, was originally committed to multi-ethnicity, the troops of the Ukrainian republic were soon engaged in pogroms just like everybody else.

Only the Germans, despite the harshness of their occupation in 1918, were not known for anti-Jewish excesses — a perverse legacy that convinced some locals two decades later that the stories of Nazi atrocities were Soviet propaganda and there was no reason to flee.

Eventually, the newly established Polish republic won out over its Ukrainian and Soviet Russian competitors. The Treaty of Riga of 1921 divided the Ukrainian state between victorious Poland and defeated Russia, and made Krakowiec Polish yet again. It would remain so until 1939, when Poland was invaded, first (on 1 September) by the Germans from the west and then (on 17 September) by the Soviets from the east. Krakowiec ended up on the Soviet side of the border and was integrated into Soviet Ukraine.

What followed would change the face of Krakowiec even more dramatically than had the first world war and the ensuing civil and inter-state wars. Stalin’s police went after political enemies of the Soviets as well as “class enemies.” Many of them were Polish, of course, but also Jewish: a shopkeeper, a factory owner, even the operator of an export business for Galician eggs (which were shipped to Germany and as far as England) were “capitalists” in Soviet eyes, particularly if they “exploited” (employed) others to do some of the work.

Many Jewish entrepreneurs were arrested and their families deported to the Soviet hinterland. Perversely, this saved many of them: life in Stalin’s concentration camp state was less lethal than being Jewish under the Nazis.

When the Germans invaded in the summer of 1941 they brought with them the genocidal Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that systematically murdered Jews. They had help from Ukrainian nationalists who had become inspired by fascism, like the radical right everywhere. An increasingly bitter four-way struggle developed between these radical Ukrainians, the Polish underground Home Army, German counterinsurgency troops and Soviet partisans, with Jews caught between all fronts. When the Red Army liberated Krakowiec in May 1944, only one Jew emerged from his hiding place. Of the 104,700 Jews who had lived in Krakowiec before the war, only 1689 survived.

Wasserstein’s grandparents, Berl and Czarna, and his aunt Lotte had originally escaped deportation to a ghetto and then the ghetto’s “liquidation.” But the Ukrainian neighbour who had sheltered them for a year eventually gave them up. The Nazis shot them in April 1944, just three months before the Red Army arrived.

Why and how the Wassersteins found themselves in Krakowiec when the war broke out, and why Wasserstein’s father Abraham (“Addi”) escaped their fate, is a history in itself.

A Small Town in Ukraine begins with the deportation of Berl and Addi from Berlin in October 1938, part of a mass expulsion of Ostjuden (“eastern Jews”) from Nazi Germany. Berl had been sixteen when the first world war came to his native Krakowiec. Like many Galician Jews, he and his family fled the advancing Russian army in 1914, eventually moving to Vienna, capital of the Habsburg empire, of which they were loyal subjects.

Perhaps trying to evade military service, Berl kept moving, first to Holland, then to Germany, where he married Czarna Laub, who also hailed from Krakowiec. The couple settled first in Frankfurt and then in Berlin, where Berl built a business producing raincoats. Neither he nor his wife ever became German citizens, but their children grew up speaking German rather than Polish or Yiddish. Nevertheless, for the Nazis after 1933, they were aliens in two senses: Polish refugees and Jews. The deportation of this group in 1938 marked one step in the radicalisation of anti-Jewish policies that would culminate in genocide.

Thus, the Wassersteins were forced back to the provincial Krakowiec they had worked so hard to escape. Berl was allowed a short visit to Berlin to collect the women of the family and liquidate his assets under rules that effectively meant confiscation. Addi, equipped with false papers, managed to travel through Germany, ostensibly en route to Latin America. He arrived in time to say farewell to his sister and parents at the Eastern Railway Station in Berlin. He would never see them again.

Like the family of historian Richard Pipes, who would do so a little later and under somewhat more adventurous conditions, he then moved on to Italy. When Germany went to war with Poland shortly after Addi arrived in Rome, Mussolini’s government suspended tourist visas. Eventually he managed to reach Palestine via Turkey. His survival — the result of quick decisions and chance encounters — was little short of a miracle.

Wasserstein’s book ends with an account of his own travels to Krakowiec after the fall of the Soviet Union and his deeply ambiguous encounter with contemporary Ukraine. The once multi-ethnic Krakowiec, now Krakovets, has been transformed beyond recognition. The Nazis destroyed the Jews, and a postwar, state-led campaign of ethnic cleansing in the border regions moved Ukrainians from Poland to the Soviet Union, and Poles and the few surviving Jews in the other direction. Today, the town is a thoroughly Ukrainian settlement.

Popular memories there diverge sharply from those Wasserstein reconstructs in his book. The town was the birthplace not only of Wasserstein’s grandfather but also of Roman Shukhevych, a controversial Ukrainian national hero. He served under the Germans during the second world war before deserting to fight his own war once it became clear the Nazis would lose. Among other deeds, he commanded a German-controlled unit that “shot all the Jews we encountered” in at least two villages, according to one of his subordinates. In the postwar years he fought a guerilla war against the Soviet occupiers until his death in battle in 1950.

Today’s Krakovets not only has a monument to its questionable hero; the school Berl Wasserstein attended is named after Shukhevych as well, as is a street.

Wasserstein completed A Small Town in Ukraine just as Russia attacked the country early last year. At a time when shades of grey seem to have vanished, when intellectuals are called on to unequivocally condemn “NATO expansion” as the source of the war or throw their lot in behind Ukraine, defender of freedom and democracy, he carves out a third position.

His feelings, he writes, are “mixed.” He shares “the general abhorrence at Russian aggression and brutality” and notes that “Russian claims about ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine are outrageous black propaganda.” Ukraine today, he notes correctly, “is a democracy, albeit a fragile one.” At the same time, he is filled with “unease” at the prospect of a Ukrainian victory parade “past the garlanded statue of Roman Shukhevych” on the square in which the town’s Jews were assembled for deportation.

The glorification of Shukhevych and his comrades from the second world war, Wasserstein warns, is not “harmless exuberance.” Collective identities based on false history “are inherently contaminated and potentially dangerous.” His book is the very opposite of such mythologies: a thoughtful exploration of a painful past that lives on in the present. •

A Small Town in Ukraine: The Place We Came From, the Place We Went Back To
By Bernard Wasserstein | Allen Lane | $35 | 320 pages

The post Eastern Europe’s faultline appeared first on Inside Story.

Samir Puri’s Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine is one of the first kind. “Rapidity was the key to writing this book,” he admits — and it shows. Puri’s opinions, strongly expressed throughout, oscillate between sincere shock at the invasion, empathy with Ukraine and the Ukrainians, and dismissal of Ukraine and Ukrainians as khokhols (a slur he claims is harmless slang) who might be creating “legends” about their heroic self-defence but are ultimately mere “pawns” in “the unforgiving world of geopolitics.”

Orthodox international relations theory, also misleadingly known as “realism,” sees the world as an anarchic place where the strong rule and the weak obey. Russia, a former empire, is strong; Ukraine, a former colony, is weak. The rest follows. That Russia might indeed be in the process of learning that Ukraine is stronger than expected, that Putin might be schooled by “the unforgiving world of geopolitics,” doesn’t compute.

You want to rebuild an empire? A perfectly normal aspiration, according to the theory. Just make sure that you have a functioning military and adequate economic resources before you try to take over neighbouring countries. Such preparation would probably show “realism.” Russia’s current behaviour certainly does not.

Why did Putin go to war? Puri doesn’t really know. An international relations scholar, he suspects that it has to do with another great power — NATO, the European Union, the United States or a coalition of all three — having encroached on Russia’s turf. The overall argument of the book: It’s NATO, stupid!

The problem is that this theory doesn’t fit the observable facts. It is true that neither NATO nor the European Union has covered itself in glory in interacting with post-Soviet Russia. Russia no longer mattered, they seemed to believe, and thus could be ignored, or maybe even bossed around. Among many Europeans, that arrogance was coupled with the utopian notion that the post-1991 world was all about “soft power.” Tanks were no longer needed. Dependency on one source of oil and gas was fine. We’re all civilised, after all. War is a thing of the past.

Writing earlier this year, Britain’s former ambassador to Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a historian of Russia, was scathing. “Western diplomacy,” he wrote, was “by turns arrogant and incompetent.” He was right: to dangle NATO membership in front of Ukraine without a consensus in the alliance, a plan of how to achieve it, or a mechanism to ensure Ukraine’s security while the details were worked through, was “an unserious position.” Not to think about how to manage the Russian reaction was, likewise, negligent.

But Braithwaite also argued that “Putin’s military posturing around Ukraine is several degrees more irresponsible,” a qualification Puri ignores when he quotes the former ambassador.

Did the issue of Ukraine’s putative NATO membership drive Putin to war? Puri tries hard to squeeze recalcitrant facts into this mould. The Russian government has indeed repeatedly expressed its irritation and resentment at NATO enlargement. But NATO didn’t expand into Ukraine in 2021–22. Quite the opposite. Russia’s expressions of discontent convinced enough members — Germany chief among them — to oppose a NATO accession plan nearly a decade and a half before the current escalation. Ukraine was snubbed by NATO in 2008 only to be told repeatedly that the door was open “in principle.”

Anybody who had even the slightest knowledge of NATO’s internal affairs knew that these assurances were gestures towards the never-never. NATO’s approach was, indeed, “unserious.” In 2021–22, as Puri admits in passing, there were “no immediate signs of Ukraine’s admission into the alliance that Russia could say it was retaliating against.” That should have been the end of this theory. But no: Puri spends another seven pages trying to make the case that Putin’s “paranoia” was perfectly understandable.

Historians are used to reading international relations scholarship with sceptical tolerance. This discipline doesn’t rest on detailed knowledge of any one time, place or culture; instead, it tries to construct universalising models to be applied to any case.

But Puri doesn’t just simplify. He also makes mistakes, at time egregious ones. Russia’s provisional government of 1917, in place between the abdication of the Tsar in February and the Bolshevik coup in October, was not, as he claims, anti-imperial. The people in charge might have been liberals but they were also supporters of the empire. Looking askance at Ukraine’s parallel revolution and requests for autonomy, they continued to prosecute a war with imperial aims. That was indeed a major cause of the provisional government’s fall.

The (second) Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which the Bolsheviks were forced to sign in 1918, did not, as Puri believes, afford “Ukraine’s Nationalists a rare opportunity to make a break for freedom.” The Ukrainian People’s Republic’s declaration of independence actually preceded the treaty and Ukraine signed its own treaty with the Germans, the First Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, before the Russian Bolsheviks.

Nor did the “independent Soviet republics in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania” spring from Lenin’s head in 1918 or 1919, as Puri implies. They were independent anti-Bolshevik states until Stalin brought them back into the empire in 1940, and only then did they become Soviet republics. Western Ukraine was invaded by the Red Army on 17 September 1939 and annexed in November of that year rather than “incorporated into the USSR only after 1945,” as Puri believes.

There was indeed a referendum in Ukraine on 17 March 1991, but 71 per cent voted not “for independence,” as Puri writes, but for a reformed union of Soviet republics. It was only on 1 December of that year that a majority voted for independence, but in that case the figure was 92 per cent.

Kazakhs, meanwhile, might more than quibble with the claim that “Ukraine’s suffering was worse than in any other part of the Soviet Union” during the great famine. A larger share of Kazakhs died than of Ukrainians, although in absolute numbers Ukraine — a much larger nation — lost more.

Puri’s account, in other words, is deficient on both empirical and analytical levels. Unless readers are looking for quick soundbites, his book is best left on the shelf.

Journalist Anna Arutunyan’s Hybrid Warriors falls into the second category. Based on her years of reporting since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, it combines a deeply textured knowledge of ground-level politics with a well-theorised sense of how Putin’s regime works.

Arutunyan’s Putin is no master strategist. Nor is he an all-powerful dictator. He’s indecisive and relatively weak, driven along by his more dynamic (and often more radical) underlings. He rules “by signal” rather than by command, issuing “vague directives that could, depending on the recipient, be interpreted as commands or mere opinions.” More often than not, political entrepreneurs, both in Russia and abroad, have “projected onto the Russian president’s cryptic words everything they wanted to hear.” In reality, Russia’s strategy has been “confused, convoluted, unformed.”

The Crimean annexation was the result of improvisation. Contingency plans for the operation had been on the shelf for a while, but when they were activated the exact goal of the operation wasn’t completely clear. What transpired was the interaction of a planned and well-executed special forces operation (the famous “little green men,” unmarked, polite, silent and well equipped), local militias enraged by the revolution in Kyiv, which they saw as a coup, and local politicians.

The staged referendum, in which the vast majority of Crimean residents voted to join Russia, lacked validity in international law. But annexation nevertheless had a significant degree of popular support, with a 1996 Gallup poll showing 59 per cent support among Russians living in Crimea and 41 per cent among Crimean Ukrainians.

In a way, the Russian government caved in to pressures from below, breaking the pledge to respect Ukraine’s borders that it had made in both the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership with Kyiv. But while Moscow was riding a popular wave and interacting with local pro-Russian forces, it was clearly Putin’s regime that took the initiative in Crimea.

Donbas was different. Here, local initiative was key. Yes, a gang of fifty-two military veterans and second world war re-enactors trudged across the border in April 2014 and took the regional city of Slovyansk, which they would hold until the Ukrainian army pushed them out in July. True, they were led by a retired agent with the Federal Security Service, or FSB, Igor Girkin (known as “Strelkov,” or shooter), but Girkin was a freelancer at that stage.

Elsewhere, it was angry locals — a militant minority, but still locals — who were inspired by the Crimean example to take matters into their own hands. “By early May 2014,” writes Arutunyan, “miners, truck drivers, an assortment of local pensioners and shady businessmen, and an army of local and Russian adventure-seekers had set up their own pretend governments with flags, parliaments, defence ministries, militias, declarations of independence and even proto-constitutions with formal elections scheduled for later in the month.”

While their grievances were local and of long standing, these groups didn’t represent the local population. Independent opinion polls showed only 30 per cent support for secession. Also unlike Crimea, they were not guided by the Kremlin. As Arutunyan puts it, they “lacked the main thing… that they had fought for: Russia’s formal recognition and protection.”

Essentially, a militant minority — scared by the revolution that had driven president Viktor Yanukovych from office, saturated by Russian state television propaganda about “fascism” in Kyiv, and inspired by the takeover of Crimea — staged a coup and then appealed to Moscow to bail them out. But the weak dictator in the Kremlin refused. By the end of April 2014, the Kremlin had decided not to send troops to the Ukrainian mainland.

We don’t know why this decision was made, but it’s worth remembering that the European Union had suspended preparations for a G8 summit in Sochi on 3 March 2014, cancelled bilateral talks with Russia on 6 March, and begun imposing sanctions against Russian officials and companies on 17 March, 20 March and 15 April. Europe also threatened “broader economic and trade sanctions” should Russia further escalate its aggression against Ukraine.

These EU measures were synchronised with a set of executive orders by US president Barack Obama on 6, 17 and 20 March, which added sanctions against individuals in Russia’s elite. The timing suggests that the Kremlin retreated from exposed positions because it found the likely cost of escalation prohibitive.

Sanctions were indeed one of three reasons Putin changed his mind, according to Arutunyan. He also recognised that, in contrast to Crimea, Russia would have to contend with military action by Kyiv, which had announced its “anti-terrorist operation” on 15 April. And he understood that, wishful thinking aside, local support for the insurgents in Donbas was nowhere near as widespread as in Crimea.

But the tough EU and US response had a contradictory result:

Putin felt he was in a bind. Crimea had demonstrated that the Kremlin and its army was perfectly capable of decisive action — of securing an entire peninsula and enabling a parliament to vote to join Russia — swiftly and secretly, with the help of the local population. However, in the Donbas the risks were higher, the opposition greater and the support weaker. If he launched a full-blown military intervention, he would trigger a tougher Western response and quite possibly find himself trying to prop up a regime with no real constituency. Yet if he backed away entirely, he would show weakness to the Americans and to his own nationalists. He could neither advance nor abandon the Donbas project.

Thus, Russia continued to be involved in Donbas. By July 2014 the FSB and military intelligence were competing to command the Donbas insurgents in an attempt “to demonstrate their own value to the Kremlin.”

The FSB in particular became deeply embroiled in the Donbas mess. Its assessment that the revolution against Yanukovych was a CIA-inspired plot rather than a popular uprising had contributed to the decision to annex Crimea. Now it had “300 men in Donbas,” as one FSB major told Arutunyan, and was awaiting orders from Moscow. “Putin — give us orders!” they demanded. “We need just one day and Ukraine will be ours.”

The weak dictator was being bum-steered by his most devoted underlings. But he was resisting their push without being in a position to call back the FSB, which he had once led and which was full of his old comrades from KGB times. “His very power as president rested on their loyalty to him — and thus on his loyalty to them,” writes Arutunyan.

The support for the Donbas adventure went far beyond the FSB. To put a stop to it would have required a veritable purge of the power apparatus. Thus, the strange limbo in which the situation remained. Neither willing to escalate nor able to reverse, the Kremlin began imposing control over the separatist movement and its self-proclaimed “governments.”

Eventually, however, Putin did send troops. He had been hitching his political wagon increasingly to the ultra-nationalist right since 2012, when massive demonstrations against his return to the presidency had alienated him decisively from the political middle (to say nothing of the left). His new right-wing constituency supported the political freelancers in Donbas, so when Kyiv launched a successful operation to take Donbas back from the putschists, his new allies convinced him that it was in Russia’s interest to resist.

Russian troops, regular ones this time, were fighting in Ukraine by August 2014. This “covert Russian invasion of mainland Ukraine” halted the Ukrainian army’s attempt to re-establish control of Ukrainian territory. It was regular Russian troops that turned the Donbas insurgency into a frozen conflict; it was regular Russian troops that won the battle of Debaltseve in February 2015. Then the frontlines froze.

Once again, according to Arutunyan, no grand Russian strategy existed. Events were driven not by geopolitics but by the balance of power within the Russian dictatorship.

The right wing of politics, on which Putin’s regime increasingly relied, could only be contained if Ukraine could be stopped from taking back Donbas. This dynamic became self-reinforcing: the support of the nationalists, imperialists, monarchists and fascists at home required support for the Donbas rebels; the continuing existence and, as they saw it, martyrdom of the Donbas proxies propelled the domestic far right further into the mainstream. “For Putin,” writes Arutunyan, “it was paramount that these people continued viewing the West as their true enemy, and not the Kremlin itself.”

How did we get from this impasse to 24/2? Arutunyan doesn’t really know. Her account becomes much less richly textured after 2015, and in particular after 2019. Why negotiations with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president since 2019, were abandoned remains unclear. Why the decision was made to allow all-out war remains mysterious. The logic of her argument would point to some dynamic from below, some initiative by political entrepreneurs. But there is no evidence to that effect. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that the initiative came from Putin, and that it shocked even those closest to him.

Arutunyan’s explanation thus focuses on the Russian president, and his resentments and likely thought processes. The invasion, she writes, was “about one man, and his vendetta.” Earlier in the book she had dismissed such mind-reading, but what is the alternative given Putin’s centrality in Russia’s political system?

This centrality seems to have increased since 2014. The destruction of civil society, which hampered the left, might also have hampered the right. The disaster of the Donbas war, caused by freelancers, might well have made Putin more reluctant to take advice from the same or similar people. Coronavirus isolation in 2020–21 might have done the rest: Putin spent the pandemic reading history books, stewing in his resentments (about NATO expansion, about not being taken seriously), and pondering his legacy (he turned seventy this year).

Then there was Russia’s recent success in Syria, which suggested its army was top-notch. The FSB presented the Ukrainian army’s intensified training and improved equipment as a Western conspiracy to weaken and maybe destroy Russia. Yet the West also seemed weak. Maybe now was the time to solve this problem once and for all? Whatever the reasons, in the end it was Putin who pulled the trigger on 24/2.

What are the implications of Arutunyan’s analysis for policymakers confronting an aggressive Russia? She is unsure herself. “[I] gave up my futile attempts to come up with some sort of possible solution to this mess,” she writes in frustration. And she’s right: if the invasion was the result “of a Kremlin fumbling in the dark, staggering to respond to a multitude of real and perceived threats and opportunities, and proving itself largely incapable of distinguishing one from the other,” and if 24/2 was the result of an increasingly isolated and erratic dictator steaming in his own resentments and historical analogies, then rational outside action is difficult.

Arutunyan’s description of the complexity of the political environment in which Putin functions, moreover, serves to remind outsiders of how little influence their actions have on the Kremlin. This might chasten both the critics of NATO, who overestimate how much Putin was swayed by the perceived aggression of “the West,” and the supporters of sanctions against Russia, which Arutunyan’s account makes clear were just one factor, and mostly marginal, in Putin’s calculus.

What is left? For the time being, all we can do is try to support Ukraine as best as we can to give it a chance to survive and win this war. And when Ukraine is ready to negotiate with Russia, we should support this process with as much humility as we can. A lot of bitterness exists on both sides of the frontlines now, and it won’t go away anytime soon. If we take into account not just the war itself but also the rebuilding effort, we are talking about a long haul indeed.

Stamina will thus be required at a time when inflation and the climate crisis also call for sustained government attention.

Russia, meanwhile, won’t be defeated in the way Germany or Iraq were. Putin’s troops might eventually be pushed out of much or all of Ukraine’s territory, but nobody in their right mind will want to go further and march on Moscow. The regime might thus survive, more resentful than ever. Or it might be replaced by another, probably no less resentful or autocratic. In any case, Russia could require containment for some time to come. Here, too, stamina will be necessary — and a significant amount of humility about what can be achieved.

All things come to an end eventually. And maybe Arutunyan is right when she says that Russia’s younger generation will in time provide more rational leadership for this large, rich and beautiful country. The rising generation is “muzzled” but “watching, in horror” while “learning from the mistakes of this dying regime,” she writes. A “new Russia, with its own, new national identity, will eventually emerge.” Let’s hope she is right. •

Samir Puri responds to Mark Edele’s review

Russia’s Road to War with Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires
By Samir Puri | Biteback | $39.99 | 304 pages

Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle for Ukraine
By Anna Arutunyan | Hurst & Company | $44.99 | 352 pages

The post “It’s NATO, stupid!” appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite the misgivings of professional historians, this quest for understanding — the hope that we can learn from history — is indeed one of the reasons why historical works continue to attract readers well beyond academe.

Philosophers have long debated the question of agency and constraint, and Kershaw’s introduction is a clear-sighted guide. For determinists, leaders are driven by passions and hindered by their location and time, the consequences of their actions building up into processes and systems no individual controls. For romantics, at the other extreme, history is made by “great people” (or, mostly, “great men”) who shape events with vision and willpower.

In any polarised debate, there’s a golden middle. Remarkably, here it was formulated by a radical: Karl Marx. From a determinist starting point, he tried to make sense of how, at certain historical moments, individuals can prove decisive. He distilled this insight in a statement that has become something of a platitude: people make history, but they make it under conditions they neither created nor fully control.

Kershaw is a historian, not a philosopher. And historians can’t say in the abstract whether a person can “make history.” It depends on context. Certain situations and certain institutional arrangements lend themselves more to romantic-looking action, while others might constrain even the most headstrong and visionary individual. Power, of course, plays a role here: it’s the ability to make others do as you please. If you are in a position of power, your decisions — good or bad — tend to have more of an impact than if you are not.

Even among political leaders, though, circumstances matter: the domestic and international context, the problems needing to be solved and the means available to do so, and whether or not they are lucky. Some contexts will allow the leader’s personality to have a massive impact; others will not. And a strong personality’s impact on the course of events can be altogether different from their long-term legacy.

The two extreme cases in Kershaw’s sample are Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito and German chancellor Helmut Kohl. Tito clearly impressed Kershaw. He appears larger than life on these pages: a man of strong intellect, physical and political bravery, expansive sexual appetites, brutality, callousness and charm. Able to suffer stoically during the war, he embraced the good life once he could: this was partisan leader turned head of a communist nation who liked to cruise the world on his private yacht.

Contradictory as Tito was, he was the ultimate example of a charismatic leader: without him, the Yugoslav partisans could not have done the incredible and defeated the German occupiers with only minor outside help, a unique achievement during the second world war. Without Tito, likewise, communist Yugoslavia could not have stayed out of the Soviet orbit after 1945, taking a leading role in the movement of non-aligned states during the cold war. And without Tito, Yugoslavia, that somewhat artificial creation of the aftermath of the first world war — neither a nation-state nor an empire — would have disintegrated long before it did.

At the other end of the spectrum is Kohl, German chancellor for an incredible decade and a half, 1982–98. Something of an unimaginative nonentity, he was often clumsy on the world stage and entirely lacking in vision beyond what he could see from his reserved table in his local pub, where he would talk to his cronies and eat the most ghastly of all German dishes, Saumagen. The butt of jokes by the German intelligentsia throughout his years in power, his ordinariness was what attracted many voters: this was a dull country longing for stability rather than excitement.

To his credit, Kohl was a far cry from the neoliberal disruptors in Britain, Australia and the United States. His government reacted to the same crisis of postwar welfare capitalism that brought Margaret Thatcher to power by adjusting the welfare state rather than destroying it.

Had Kohl resigned in 1988, he would have been no more than a footnote in the history books: in Kershaw’s words, “an entirely unexceptional democratic leader.” But then came 1989, the year the crisis erupted in Eastern Europe and the Soviet empire imploded. The wall dividing East and West Germany, that concrete symbol of the cold war division of Europe, came down and Germans celebrated on its ruins the reunification with their cousins on the other side.

Kohl had little to do with these stunning developments. Propelled by events, though, he took the initiative. His somewhat dull personality proved useful in establishing good relations with world leaders: he was the personification of a Germany that was too interested in local cuisine and a quiet life in the provinces to threaten Europe ever again. He became the “chancellor of unity,” a major figure in the history books with a legacy even his later entanglement in a corruption scandal could not blemish.

Ironically, then, the type of person the romantics would champion as a genius, Tito, has left no legacy. Not only does communism no longer exist; Yugoslavia has gone too. Meanwhile, a nonentity interested in little beyond maintaining power left a united Germany within a still relatively united Europe.

Tito and Kohl are only two of the twelve leaders Kershaw explores. He begins with Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, then shifts to Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Konrad Adenauer before exploring the lives of Francisco Franco, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Each chapter is informed by the latest historiography and provides a sure-footed and balanced interpretation. Anybody who wants a quick, readable and well-informed introduction to the life and legacy of any of Kershaw’s twelve protagonists can reach for Personality and Power. Anybody who wants a well-constructed political history of Europe in the twentieth century can read the book cover to cover, as Kershaw skilfully links his narratives with a thread of themes and findings.

As a history of Europe, this is “history from above,” the kind of history social and cultural historians have rebelled against since the 1960s. These critics have condemned the writing of history as a chronicle of the actions of “pale males” in positions of power. Is Kershaw suggesting we resume ignoring women, people of colour, and common folk? No, he is not. His focus is certainly on those in power, and most of his case studies are of men. And all of them would be regarded as “white.”

But this is not a book about “great men who make history.” Kershaw is dismissive of the entire idea of “greatness,” an analytically vacuous and politically dubious concept. The reason most of his actors are male and white is because, in twentieth-century Europe, Margaret Thatcher was one of very few women who made it to the top of a country’s power structure, and only recently could people of colour make political careers in that part of the world.

Moreover, Kershaw’s analysis is rooted in a deeply understood social and cultural history of Europe. He explores the lives of leaders who emerged from and remained embedded in the societies they led. This history of (not so) great men thus combines social and political history in a genre Kershaw helped shape with his pioneering two-volume study of Hitler, published in 1998 and 2000.

Some of the social history that shapes Personality and Power is couched in somewhat old-fashioned language, particularly the hazy concept of “modernisation,” a shorthand for all those larger social forces beyond the control of any one individual. Lenin’s family, we learn, supported “modernising reforms that would make Russia more like the more enlightened societies of western Europe.” Did they mean the same thing as Lenin’s successors, who fought over “the question of how quickly the Soviet Union should modernise”? Or Adenauer, who as lord mayor of Cologne during the Weimar years “introduced modernising improvements to the amenities of Cologne”?

A little later, Mussolini struggled with the “inadequate modernisation” of Italy’s armed forces, while Hitler oversaw “economic modernisation” only in the armaments industry. De Gaulle was unable “to bend to his brand of authoritarianism the forces of modernisation… which were coursing through France and the rest of Europe in the 1960s.” Likewise, in Spain, “modernisation increasingly showed Franco and his regime to be obsolete leftovers from a bygone age” and, later, “the forces of modernisation were overtaking the outmoded authoritarianism of the system.”

In 1970s Britain, meanwhile, “the spread of global modernisation” meant that other countries had caught up with Britain’s level of development, leading to a perception of decline. In the Soviet Union “the economy had to be modernised,” a fate that also befell “German conservatism” under Kohl.

What does any of this mean? It’s clear enough what “technological modernisation” entails — the embrace of newer and better cars, tanks, can openers and telephones. But what is political, social or cultural modernisation? Here the word simply stands for “change,” often with the implicit meaning of “change for the better.”

“Modernisation theory,” once popular among non-Marxist social scientists and historians, was a way to talk about directed change without having to embrace Marxian principles. But the premise of this framework has undergone rather severe critique since the 1970s and it’s somewhat baffling to find it in the writings of a historian as sophisticated as Kershaw.

The absurdity of the concept can be illustrated by applying it to recent political developments. Has Donald Trump “modernised” US politics, for example? His popularity was founded on his status as a TV celebrity — “modern,” no doubt — and his campaigning and even governing (if that is the right word) relied heavily on Twitter — also very “modern.” Hence, should we call him a “moderniser”? Or was his undermining of democratic governance and even the very concept of truth a “de-modernisation”?

The other somewhat old-fashioned aspect of this book is its Eurocentrism. This is a history of personality and power in twentieth-century Europe rather than the wider world. This constraint is regrettable because readers would have benefited if Kershaw had more widely applied his judgements and ability to carefully synthesise the historiography. A chapter on Mao, for example, would have been enlightening, as would one on Indira Gandhi. This would also have made the book more useful for the undergraduate classroom, as political history today is more likely to be taught in a world-historical frame than a European one.

What, then, can we “learn” from this history? Kershaw tries to distil his conclusions into a series of seven propositions. They appear a bit clumsy, a somewhat pedestrian form of social science, and stand in sharp contrast to the sure-footed and well-written interpretations of the twelve individuals.

More powerful is his own personal preference, stated early in the book: “I would be happy to avoid ‘charismatic’ personalities altogether in favour of leaders who, if less colourful, can offer competent, effective governance based on collective deliberation and well-founded, rational decisions aimed at improving the lives of all citizens.” But, as his book shows, circumstance can throw such leaders into situations where they will have to act in less deliberative, quasi-dictatorial ways. And it is in these circumstances that their personal qualities will matter most. Hence, we should all worry about those who lead us.

In ordinary circumstances, personal qualities might not matter much; in extraordinary circumstances (pandemics, wars, natural disasters), they do. •

Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe
By Ian Kershaw | Allen Lane | $55 | 512 pages

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The battle for Ukraine is part of a larger conflict over empire and decolonisation that reaches back to the period 1914–22, broke open again in 1989–91, and has simmered since the Soviet Union split into fifteen successor states in 1991. What we are witnessing, in effect, is one battle in one theatre of a potentially much more regional conflict made up of the (civil) wars of the Soviet succession. They have combined domestic and international struggles over independence and empire with contests between dictatorship and democracy.

Ukraine is only one theatre of these conflicts. In Belarus, mass protests against the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in 2020–21 were subdued with utter brutality. Russian support for the Belarusian dictator kept his regime going despite crippling sanctions, effectively turning him into a client of Moscow.

While the violence in Belarus was administered by domestic forces, similar anti-regime protests in Kazakhstan in January prompted the intervention of Russian, Belarusian, Armenian, Tajik and Kyrgyz troops to help prop up the government. Most recently, the conflict over landlocked Nagorno-Karabakh, in the South Caucasus, has turned from a frozen conflict between Russian-backed Armenia and Turkish-supported Azerbaijan into a shooting war after Azerbaijan, exploiting Russia’s distraction elsewhere, attacked Armenian positions on 12 September. Two days later, fighting broke out further east as well, at the volatile central Asian border between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

What all of these conflicts have in common is that they are rooted in unresolved problems stemming from the breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1991.

Wars and civil wars are not unusual when empires break apart: boundaries between possible successors are unclear, loyalties fragile, legitimacies tenuous. When the Romanov empire imploded in 1917–18, the horrible fighting lasted until early 1920 in some regions, into early 1921 in others, and until 1923 in central Asia. The result, however, was a re-establishment of a new empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Only Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland remained independent, at least until the second world war. Then the three Baltic states were annexed, Poland made a satellite and Finland forced into neutrality.

What is unique about the current conflicts of the Soviet succession is that they took so long to gestate. The breakdown of the Soviet empire in 1989–91 was largely peaceful. This point can be overstressed: there was violence in Georgia in 1989 and in Lithuania in 1991, wars for and against independence in South Ossetia in 1991–92, Transnistria in 1992 and Abkhazia in 1992–93, a civil war in Tajikistan and a war-turned-frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh from 1992, and two wars to prevent Chechnya’s breaking away from Russia in 1994–96 and 1999–2000. Nevertheless, the Soviet lands were largely spared the horrors of the wars of the Yugoslav succession nearby.

One reason for this relative lack of violence was that the Soviet Union broke apart not through acrimony but from exhaustion. Anti-imperial feelings were rife not only in the non-Russian periphery of the empire, but also in the Russian heartland. Many thought their economic woes were caused by the drain the empire imposed on the state’s coffers. Better to let the non-Russians go and build a Russian national homeland.

Borders, too, were relatively well defined, with the Soviet Union’s republics providing ready-made territories for successor regimes. Again, there were exceptions (South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Transnistria) but the boundaries of Soviet times generally held firm, at least until recently.

The imperial centre, Russia, experienced not only decolonisation at the periphery but also state breakdown domestically. The years after 1991 saw economic collapse accompanied by a disintegration of the state’s monopoly over the use of violence on its territory.

This was not a state capable of maintaining empire, and that only began to change with Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power from 1999. At the heart of the current president’s longstanding popularity has been his ability to rebuild the state, coupled with his good luck when rising oil prices allowed economic growth to resume.

What is easily forgotten, however, is that this was an imperial presidency from the get-go. Putin’s first major political success was the brutal victory in the second Chechen war of 1999–2000, which prevented a further decolonisation of Russia and kept a prominent non-Russian region within Moscow’s control.

The victory in Chechnya was popular across the political spectrum. I remember discussions with otherwise thoroughly liberal Russian intellectuals who insisted that this was a necessary war: if Chechnya went, who would be next? Soon, nothing might be left of Russia beyond the heartland around Moscow, from where the old empire had grown since the fourteenth century.

The Chechen war provided a model for how to leverage imperial feelings for political gain. When the petro-dollar-driven economic recovery began to stutter, when internal opposition continued to challenge his regime, however ineffectually, and when neighbouring Ukraine showed that an East Slav nation could mount repeated revolutions against kleptocrats and Russian-aligned would-be dictators, Putin mobilised the imperial undercurrent of his regime.

The proxy war in Donbas and the 2014 annexation of Crimea seemed to provide a model for how this would work: no effective resistance would be encountered; Europe and the United States would wring their hands and impose minor sanctions but do nothing of substance. An alliance of pacifists, Russophiles and “realists” could be counted on to pressure Ukraine to submit to the invader; Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and gas would mute its response. The government in Kyiv would run away and Russia would annex more of Ukraine and make the rest a vassal state similar to neighbouring Belarus. Putin would enter the history books as saviour of Russia’s greatness.

This strategy failed miserably. The Russian invasion got quickly bogged down by incompetence, lack of training and poorly maintained equipment. Ukraine’s government stood firm and its army fought intelligently and effectively, supported by a surprisingly united NATO and European Union.

After Ukraine had won the battle of Kyiv, Russia focused on Donbas as well as the south of Ukraine, where it could leverage shorter supply lines. Progress was slow and grinding, however, relying largely on massive artillery bombardments of Ukrainian positions. While the battle for Donbas rumbled on, Russia was unable to complete the conquest of Ukraine’s coastline, where success had initially been swiftest.

Now the tide of war has turned. If Europe, the United States, Australia and other democracies continue to support Ukraine, chances are that it will eventually liberate the rest of its territory, quite possibly including Crimea. This outcome is far from guaranteed, but it looks much more realistic now than in the dark days of February and March.

Where does this military setback leave Russia? The wager on empire has clearly failed. With Russia weakened, the other theatres in the wars of the Soviet succession might well flare up again, further threatening Russia’s claim of hegemony over the region. We are already seeing this in the recent fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia as well as the Tajik–Kyrgyz border war. In Belarus, the opposition is subdued but not eliminated. It might rear its head again, threatening one of Russia’s client regimes in the west.

As far as Ukraine is concerned, Putin could finally declare his “special military operation” an actual war, and thus invoke conscription to replenish his by now anaemic forces. This is a course of action that many on the hard right as well as the Communists support. There is a reason, however, why Putin has thus far avoided such a move: it would be deeply unpopular with men of draft age and their families.

Even if it were mobilised, it isn’t clear that an army of poorly trained conscripts could make a difference now that the effects of sanctions are starting to limit Russia’s ability to resupply its army. Short of a desperate move like a nuclear strike, Putin has few good options at present. He has missed his opportunity to pull out of Ukraine in a face-saving manner. The military setbacks have weakened him both domestically and internationally.

What is far from clear is whether this weakening will translate into regime change. A popular revolution following the Ukrainian examples of 2004–05 and 2013–14 seems unlikely, although not altogether impossible. Belarus in 2020–21 has shown that even mass protests can be repressed if army and police remain loyal. And Putin’s dictatorship has toughened up dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine in February.

If the agents of organised violence remain behind him, Putin can politically survive the military catastrophe. But whether he will pull his troops out now he has clearly lost is another matter. He is more likely to try to stay the course and defend the territory he still controls. Thus Ukraine will continue to need outside support — including supplies of heavy weapons — to win this crucial part of the delayed wars of the Soviet succession. •

The post The long war of Soviet succession appeared first on Inside Story.

After some initial cold war amnesia, historians in the English-speaking world have, by and large, accepted that the war in Europe was won by the Red Army. Most also agree that, on balance, this was a good outcome. While Stalin’s totalitarianism would victimise millions, it was the lesser evil. And until the Western allies developed significant amphibious capability relatively late in the war, there simply was no alternative: only the Soviets could fight Hitler on the continent.

Recently, however, a new generation of English-language historians have returned to the tune that it was Private Ryan and his friends, or the valiant boys of Bomber Command, who won the war. Stalin and his soldiers, at best, were conduits for American military aid (via Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease scheme).

Now, Sean McMeekin has joined this new assault on the Soviet war record. Born in 1974, he has taken great delight in publishing books designed to increase the blood pressure of historians of an older generation. His biggest coups were a tome about the first world war that claimed, in the words of one reviewer, that Russia was “responsible for everything from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand to the Armenian genocide,” and a history of the Russian Revolution that argued Lenin’s victory showed what happens if you let liberals run a country. Hilariously, it also warned darkly of the new socialism of a Bernie Sanders or a Thomas Piketty.

Stalin’s War might well lead to heart attacks among historians of the second world war. In short, this fast-paced and well-written account argues that the historiography is too obsessed with Hitler, has underestimated the importance of Lend-Lease to the Soviet war effort, and has failed to see that the Soviet dictator was at least as bad as his German colleague. British and US support for the Soviet Union was caused by the leaders’ irrational “Stalinophilia,” not by a realistic assessment of the balance of forces. The Soviets only won because of Western military aid.

Such judgements are based on a caricatured picture of the literature on this war. Neither the authoritative three-volume Cambridge History of the Second World War (2015), nor Evan Mawdsley’s masterful short introduction (2009), for example, apologise for Stalin or concentrate on Hitler. The role of Lend-Lease has been discussed at length, and with significant nuance, including by scholars McMeekin quotes. And historians like Robert Gellately have written damning accounts of Stalin’s goals in war and cold war, which, predictably, are passed over by McMeekin. Don’t let bibliographical research get in the way of a good story.

If McMeekin is cavalier with historians who came before him, he’s often tendentious when it comes to using primary sources. To give one example: the speech of Stalin to the graduates of the Red Army military academies on 5 May 1941 that starts the book, which was published in 1998 in a collection famous among historians. This book is not “out of print today and difficult to find,” as McMeekin claims, but freely available on the internet. To cite the relevant section of the source in full:

Major-general of the tank forces is speaking. He proposes a toast to the peaceful Stalinist foreign policy.

Comrade Stalin: Allow me a correction. The peaceful policy ensured peace for our country. A peaceful policy is a good thing. For the time being, we pursued a line of defence — until we re-equipped our army, provided our army with modern means of fighting.

And now, when we have reconstructed our army, saturated it with equipment for modern combat, when we have become strong — now we need to move from defence to offence.

In order to defend our country, we are obliged to act in an offensive manner. From defence [we have to] transition to a military policy of offensive actions. We have to rebuild our education, our propaganda, our agitation, our press in an offensive spirit. The Red Army is a modern army, and a modern army is an offensive army.

Historians have puzzled over these words. Did Stalin tell his soldiers that he was planning offensive war? Did Stalin have one drink too many at the reception and make off-the cuff remarks he needed to walk back later? Or was this a pep talk to bring the troops into line with military doctrine: that any attack on the Soviet Union would be repulsed aggressively and finished quickly on the opponent’s territory? Each interpretation can be made plausible by citing other evidence, but none is provable beyond a reasonable doubt.

Historians are of course not obliged to tell their readers about every step they took from reading the sources to producing their interpretation. But McMeekin does something else altogether in order to advance his case against Stalin. Here is how he renders the leader’s remarks in his book:

What transpired next was so dramatic, so unexpected, that no one present ever forgot it… Stalin leapt to his feet, cut off the poor lieutenant general, and reproached him for pushing an “out of date policy.” Stalin then moderated his tone, reassuring the officers and party bosses present that the “Soviet peace policy”… had indeed bought the Red Army time to modernise and rearm, while also allowing the USSR to “push forward in the west and north, increasing its population by thirteen million in the process.” But the days of peaceful absorption of new territory, Stalin stated forthrightly, “had come to an end. Not another foot of ground can be gained with such peaceful sentiments.”

The Red Army, Stalin told its future commanders, “must get used to the idea that the era of the peace policy is at an end and that the era of widening the socialist front by force has begun.” Anyone “who failed to recognise the necessity of offensive action,” Stalin admonished, “was a bourgeois and a fool.” The defensive doctrine that had animated strategic planning and war-gaming for a European conflict prior to 1941, he explained, was appropriate only for a weak, unprepared Red Army.

This is not history in the normal sense of the word: a disciplined, if imaginative rendering of the past constrained by what the sources say. The archival account of this speech simply does not have Stalin leap to his feet; he says nothing about an “out of date policy,” a thirteen million population increase, or a push to the west and north. No bourgeois fools and widening fronts. Where does McMeekin get this from? I checked the online version of the source, its hard copy version in the collection he cites from, and the version in the Stalin archive (for which he gives a wrong file number in his footnote). Nowhere could I find words even close to these.

A close reading of the convoluted endnote to this episode and a trip to my university’s library eventually revealed the source: an account by a German diplomat who was not present at the occasion. Published in 1956 and cited in 1985 in a notorious German revisionist history (translated into English in 1987), this version relies on interrogations of captured Soviet soldiers later in the war. It has been dismissed by most historians for obvious reasons, but McMeekin claims that it conforms to other eyewitness accounts. I checked these, too: no such words. Instead, they confirm the more boring Soviet archival version.

The most telling quotations, then, the words that allow McMeekin to prosecute his case against Stalin the alleged warmonger, come from an account far removed from the actual speech and published well before the Soviet archives opened. They have been called “embellishment(s)” by the most in-depth investigation, which McMeekin cites as if it supports his reading (it does not). So much for the revelations from the Soviet archives on which this book is said to be based.

The misleading use of the 1941 speech is not the only technical concern historians might raise with McMeekin’s account. He misquotes a famous Stalin speech of 1931 as having taken place in 1928 (with a footnote leading nowhere); he misplaces Stalin’s deportation of the Soviet Korean population (which happened in 1937 in response to the outbreak of war in Asia) to 1938, allegedly some kind of perverse victory celebration after the Battle of Lake Khasan; he claims that Britain was “grasping for legal straws to avoid entanglement with Stalin” by interpreting the phrase “European power” in the 25 August 1939 Agreement of Mutual Assistance with Poland to mean Germany only (in fact this was explicitly stated in a secret protocol to the agreement); he asserts that the April 1941 neutrality pact with Japan allowed Stalin “to concentrate everything he had on the West,” stripping “his Far Eastern defenses” (in fact, Soviet troop strength in the east never fell below 1.1 million men, with significant military assets deployed throughout the war); etc. etc. His account of the role of US and British aid — central to his argument — is a beautiful polemic that unfortunately obscures the real constellation of forces and is not infrequently undermined by his own evidence.

Most egregiously, McMeekin cites a 1939 forgery of an alleged Stalin speech as authentic, claiming that it was recently “discovered in the Russian archives.” There is, indeed, a copy — in an archive holding foreign-origin documents — and it is a translation from a French original. Even the article McMeekin cites for proof of the authenticity of this document notes that “it seems to originate from an article published in the French La Revue universelle” in 1944. As the most accomplished political historian of Stalinism wrote in a work McMeekin cites himself: “Most historians have never assigned much significance to this forgery. Neither the Politburo archive nor Stalin’s own files contain even circumstantial evidence of such a speech.” But McMeekin cites it — because it fits his plot.

Such examples undermine confidence in McMeekin as a historian. His book makes a lot of arguable points: that Stalin always had one eye on his own Eastern Front, the front with Japan; that he was a Marxist who saw little difference between an English Tory and a German Nazi; that his foreign policy was cynical to an extreme degree, exploiting his allies as much as he could; that in the run-up to the notorious Molotov–Ribbentrop agreement of August 1939 he was far from a passive figure, actively shopping around for the best deal he could get for his country; that the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 was more than just a bloodless sideshow; that the Sovietisation of the newly acquired “western borderlands” in 1939–41 and then again from 1944 was an incredibly violent affair; that Britain and France could have stopped both the German war machine and Stalin’s expansion into eastern Europe had they bombed the Baku oilfields in 1940; that the April 1941 neutrality pact with Japan was a major “coup” with serious strategic consequences; that the Soviets were busily preparing for war with Germany in 1941; that Roosevelt was naive in his dealings with Stalin; and that both the US president and the British PM adopted “an attitude of wilful blindness toward Stalin’s crimes.” He is right, too, in pointing out that many aspects of Stalin’s war make it impossible to tell the story of the second world war as a simple fight of good against evil. But his zeal to completely discredit the Soviet (read: Russian) war effort has seduced him into suspending the critical method his métier demands.

McMeekin has thus done a great service to the history warrior in the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin has long complained that Western historians downplay his country’s contribution to victory over Germany and Japan. The Russian president has also offered his own tendentious account of how to properly understand this history. McMeekin’s account is an equally misleading response in a new international history (cold) war. A gifted writer and a talented polemicist, he has lowered the historian’s craft to the level of propaganda. The result is a lamentable step back in our understanding of Stalin and his second world war. Those Russian historians who follow the line laid down in the Kremlin will have a field day with this book as an example of Western distortions of history. McMeekin has made their job rather too easy. •

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