Ukraine and the Liberation of Russia: Weighing Future Historical Processes

 

            In 1945, Germany lay in ruins.  The Allies had succeeded in not only neutralising Germany as a military threat, but in taking full control of their two-time enemy (three-time for France).  The Soviet occupiers did what conquerors had always done: they plundered anything of value that was left, especially industrial equipment and technical expertise.  The three western occupiers proceeded differently.  While France still engaged in a certain amount of plunder in the name of war reparations, Britain and the United States were concerned to get their parts of Germany up and running again economically, so as not to be faced with enormous humanitarian relief burdens.  Out of this concern arose the Marshall Plan, an ambitious and very generous policy, not only to rebuild Germany under western control, but to rehabilitate the rest of liberated western Europe as well.

            The long-term impact of this counterintuitive move toward the former enemy was to create a stable, prosperous anchor for western democracy and capitalism right up against the Soviet version of Germany which was poorer and more dependent on its sponsor.  When the Soviet Union was dissolved, the two parts of Germany reunited in what became, in effect, a corporate takeover of the former German Democratic Republic by the German Federal Republic.  All of East Germany’s institutions and laws were swept away and replaced by those of the west.  While the three decades since that takeover have had their challenges, the result has been (despite the denialism of some gripers and sentimentalists), a prosperous, stable, democratic former East Germany, now catching up with the western two-thirds of the country, which did, after all, get a 40-year head start on the east.  Not only that, all the countries once behind the Iron Curtain have been welcomed into the sphere of democracy and prosperity.

            This story has had economic repercussions in a “world order” built on an underlying commonality—despite smaller disagreements on policy points and diplomatic disputes—of a global system undergirded by an effort to have a shared set of rules for trade and finance.  By no means perfect, this ever-evolving system has enabled not only Europeans to become among the most well-off people in the world but has also given the Chinese authorities a means to lift hundreds of millions of their people out of abject poverty.  It has also provided a vehicle for the leadership clique of Russia to become very wealthy and to stash that wealth away from their own authorities and enjoy the lifestyle in the west that they deny their own people by way of their continuous theft of the wealth of Russia.

            But these beneficiaries—Russia and China—of the prosperity machine created in the aftermath of World War II, have demonstrated that they want only to exploit it for themselves, and when it has served their needs, to destroy it.  One thinks of a psychopath who manoeuvres his way into a wealthy woman’s life, plunders her money, and then moves on, leaving her destitute.  The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought this truth to the fore.

            Perhaps we in the west are finally waking up to the threat.  Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we have believed that everyone wanted to be like us.  But now, what was previously seen as only an opinion of the pessimistic, has become clear: there are forces who want the wealth but also who want to destroy the personal rights and freedoms, democratic structures, and efforts at an international rules-based system so that they can operate as cruelly and brutally as they please without repercussions.  To this end, they have managed to insert themselves into the minds of many westerners.  Like Wormtongue whispering in Theoden’s ear, or Sauron selectively showing Saruman the glories of his power through the palantir, they have convinced many in the west that the fight is somehow between “liberal degeneracy” and “traditional values”; that somehow, certain personal sexual choices can rot the foundations of civilization or perhaps even bring down the wrath of God.  It is a brilliant diversionary strategy to take the eyes of well meaning, traditionally minded people off the real threat, and even to convince them to undermine their own best interests—democracy, human rights—in the name of fighting the imagined enemy.

            And so, while in many western countries, the people fight each other over such shibboleths as morality, immigration, or even “creeping socialism”, the real enemy is at work to secure a world where “might makes right”, where every dictator can do to his people or anyone’s people whatever is in his power to do.  These powers use the promise of a strong leader who will make everything right to lure in people whose lives have not gone as hoped, or people who see that their own personal moral or religious leanings are becoming a minority position, or people who pine for the past, to sacrifice democracy and civil freedoms to “get their way”.  Democracy is about compromise, and freedom requires one to respect the freedom of others, but the floggers of conspiracy theories have managed to frighten people enough about a chimera to forget those fundamentals of life in a free society.

            But now, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has pulled the curtain aside to reveal the truth.  It is not George Soros or the LGBTQ+ community or civil liberties activists who are bombing cities to rubble, recking people’s lives, sending millions fleeing, and sacrificing his own young men for power.  No, it is Vladimir Putin, the champion of traditional values and of the Russian Orthodox Church against the “evils of the west.”  But Vladimir Putin has never cared much about any of that.  His concern is for himself and for his power, and those values he claims to uphold and champion have only ever been talking points and pegs for his propagandists to leverage in order to undermine the free world’s understanding of itself and thus be able to divide and weaken it.

            Putin, in this way, is no different from Stalin.  The Soviet leader used the language of Marx and Engels—proletarian control of the means of production, “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs”, and so on—but all he really wanted was power.  The people, and indeed the Soviet Union, were only means to his personal ends.  Certainly, the forced industrialisation under Stalin led some segments of the Russian people to enter a kind of industrial-bureaucratic lower middle class, but most continued to live in poor villages in underdeveloped regions, as is true even now for a large segment of the Russian population.  Compare, for example, Finland, freed from Tsarist control at the same time as the rest of the former Russian Empire, and also confronted with the challenges of war.  Though militarily neutral after World War II, Finland was anchored economically in the emerging western European sphere.  Without the need to oppress, imprison, or kill a significant portion of their own population, by the time of Stalin’s death, the average Finn lived at least as well as the average Russian, with the added benefit of having the freedom of movement.  By the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Finland, using nothing more than progressive taxation and regulatory mechanisms, was able to bring much greater protection for workers and higher levels of education and health for everyone than had 70 years of authoritarian “Communist” control in the Soviet Union.  (The word “Communist”, of course, was co-opted by the Soviets for propaganda purposes.  For the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it was about power and control, and it would more aptly have been called, the Authoritarian Party.  So too does Vladimir Putin co-opt the language of the church and of “moral decency” to cement his own power.)

            Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offers us the opportunity to turn the tide on this creeping authoritarianism.  But to do so, we must ensure that the people of Ukraine win this war, on the battlefield and in the cybersphere; in material facts and in hearts and minds.  If we can do this, and if we can undergird the continued development of Ukraine toward a stable, free democracy, integrated fully into the west, then, I believe, we can also begin the larger task of liberating Russia from 1,000 years of tyranny.  Here is how I see that unfolding.

 

1. Ukraine must win this war, which is to say, we must give Ukraine the tools to push the Russian military out of Ukraine, or at least back to where they were before this latest invasion began.  Russia’s military must be humbled.  Russian losses must be so high that it becomes impossible for Vladimir Putin to continue to pursue a military course of action for some time.  The west must give or sell any and all conventional weapons systems to Ukraine that are necessary to accomplish this.  We must not let Putin’s threats cow us into timidity. If he threatens, then we must continue to remind him loud and clear: Russia is invading, not Ukraine; Russia is smashing towns and cities; Russia is making ultimatums; Russia has territorial ambitions.  The United States and the United Kingdom are honouring their commitments to provide “security guarantees” for de-nuclearized Ukraine.  Russia is betraying that trust and attacking.  Every western leader must say this loud and clear every time they speak on the subject, and every time they communicate with the Russian government.

 

2. We must commit to a Ukrainian Marshall Plan to rebuild Ukraine’s infrastructure and industrial capacity as quickly as possible.  This must go hand-in-hand with continued help for the Ukrainian government and public so that they can pick up where they left off, improving their democratic, financial, security, and military institutions along western lines.  One of the reasons Vladimir Putin chose to invade when he did was the fact of Ukraine’s admirable progress in this regard.  He could not let them succeed because...

 

3. A stable, free, democratic, prosperous Ukraine will give the lie to Putin’s promises.  Having such a Ukraine cheek-by-jowl with Russia, with all the interpersonal overlap between the two countries, will undermine the propaganda from the Kremlin that Putin has made Russia great again.  Instead, people in Russia will become acutely aware of how their leaders do not have the best interests of the Russian people in mind.  Here too, there must be a concerted western effort to pierce the Russian propaganda bubble and expose the Putin kleptocracy.

 

4. This will touch off division and instability in Russia around questions of how to proceed into the future.  It could even spark regional uprisings among the many ethnic groups that make up the Russian Federation.  In some places, strong men would arise, as they did in the various central Asian republics.  But in other places, especially those closer to Ukraine and the Baltic Sea, there might also be a process something like the one Ukraine has been going through, with the difference that Vladimir Putin’s interference would either be reduced or eliminated, depending on the outcome of this process in the Moscow region.

 

            Having read this, you may be asking, “Are you calling for the dismemberment of Russian?”  No, I am not calling for it, but I am anticipating that as the Putin regime is undermined by the military failure in Ukraine that I hope for, centrifugal forces will be unleashed, analogous to those that broke up Yugoslavia, the difference being the size of the Russian majority over against the main ethnic minorities.  However, a weakened central government may need to devolve more powers to the local level and perhaps even create a true federal state like the United States, Canada, or Germany, in which the regions have a great deal of control over local affairs, and their representatives in the federal legislature (Duma) are not merely puppets of “the great leader.”

 

            The danger, of course, is the descent into civil war, which would encourage the rise of another strong man.  For this reason, the west will have to meddle in that civil war to support the most democratically minded of the factions, and then also to help rebuild Russia with a Marshall Plan.  Yes, Russia is big, but its population is only about 140 million, like that of Germany and France combined.  Like Germany after World War II, Russia probably should be “de-fanged” by having its nuclear arsenal decommissioned, or at least severely reduced, perhaps to the size of China’s, Britain’s, or France’s.  At any rate, the most important thing would be to create a system in which the Russian people benefit from the tremendous natural resources of their land.  In other words, oligarchs and robber barons cannot be allowed to sink their talons into the system.  Perhaps, like Germany at the end of World War II, Russia would need to be temporarily occupied and “de-Putinized” as Germany was “de-Nazified”.  Like the Germans of 1945, Russians would need to begin a process of becoming inoculated against nationalism, militarism, imperialism, and Anti-Semitism (which is, in fact, a problem in Russian society).  Of course, this process was possible for Germany because it was utterly defeated, surrendered unconditionally, and was occupied.  It is noteworthy that in the Soviet occupation zone/East Germany this process was not followed and that today the bulk of support for right wing extremism, nationalism, Anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and white supremacy comes from the former East German territory, and especially the regions to the east and south of Berlin.  Thus the prospects for such a process for Russia are dim.

 

            Nevertheless, my hope is that, freed from authoritarianism, Russians might be able to elect leaders and replace them peacefully, and fully enjoy the abundance of their land.

 

            Though this may be more fantasy than reality, if we do not have dreams and visions, they have no possibility of coming true.