Friday, March 29, 2024 | Ramadan 18, 1445 H
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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Putin can’t escape his country's history

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There is a pattern to Russia’s history, and it may be catching up with President Vladimir Putin.


Under the czars and then the commissars, Russia’s rulers wrenched enormous sacrifice from their people to achieve the power, empire and respect they believed to be Russia’s due, whether by virtue of its vast expanse, natural wealth, culture, ideology or simply its power, only to find at some point that along the way they had lost their exhausted, battered nation.


Yegor Gaidar, the wunderkind who shaped the first post-communist reforms in Russia, mulled on this cyclical pattern in an article in the newspaper Izvestia in 1994, wondering — as did many in Russia and in the West at the time — whether the pattern would repeat itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Russia’s race for a place in the civilised world recalls Achilles’ chase after the tortoise,” Gaidar wrote.


“Through superhuman effort, Russia would manage to catch up and overtake, especially in military technology. Yet the world would unnoticeably but steadily move on, and again after disgraceful and tortuous setbacks the country would regroup for a leap and make another lurch, and everything would be repeated.”


Nearly 30 years later, Putin’s efforts to reconstitute a Great Russia by force, in the process mauling Ukraine with shocking cruelty and weakening his own country for decades to come, appear to be falling into Gaidar’s pattern. What Putin had intended as a quick march on Kyiv to install a quisling regime has turned into an embarrassing and costly slugfest, with Russia increasingly forced to back down, as it did most recently in announcing a retreat from Kherson.


Russian President Vladimir Putin visits the Federal Centre for Brain and Neurotechnologies of the Federal Medical-Biological Agency in Moscow. -- Reuters
Russian President Vladimir Putin visits the Federal Centre for Brain and Neurotechnologies of the Federal Medical-Biological Agency in Moscow. -- Reuters


Whether Russians have reached the breaking point is another question. The Kremlin’s considerable repressive apparatus has been in high gear since the war began, crushing any opposition to the war in Ukraine. Even calling the war anything other than a “special military operation” could be a crime. And Putin’s strongest pitch, that “losing” Ukraine represents a humiliating demotion of Russia the superpower, still resonates among people who were raised on the Soviet ethos, in which empire was a far stronger bond than nationalism.


Yet, whether Russians really accept Putin’s shifting justifications for the war, it is becoming clear that there are limits to what they are prepared to pay for his revanchist dreams. Tens of thousands of Russian men rushed for the borders after Putin announced a mass mobilisation, joining the estimated hundreds of thousands of the best and brightest who have fled since the war began. Meanwhile, pro-Kremlin hawks have taken to openly sniping at the incompetence of Russia’s military commanders and the enormous casualties Russia is suffering.


Making Russia great again is a theme Putin has elaborated over many years now, from bemoaning the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “genuine tragedy” to venting his consuming resentment of the “so-called West” — essentially the United States — for not accepting Russia, and himself, as an equal in global power.


He has drawn liberally on his rewriting of Russian history and culture — as he did again in the Valdai speech, citing, among others, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky — to claim a spiritual superiority over a West he sees as decadent and decaying. Never mind that these two writers were both repressed by the state, Soviet and czarist, and that Russia is widely perceived as a kleptocracy.


Much of Putin’s criticism of the West is shared, of course, by the West. Yet Putin approaches not from an informed analysis but through a Soviet prism that profoundly distorted the West, and projected onto it all autocratic and repressive machinations of the Kremlin.


There is no soft power in this equation, no appreciation of reasons Ukraine might be more attracted to Europe than to Russia, but only spheres of control parcelled out according to rules of conquest and control that the West rejected after World War II. The longings of the Ukrainians have no part in this; Russia’s — Putin’s — mission is to return to Russia what is Russia’s by right of might.


As to Lukyanov’s question about timing, it is becoming evident that Putin, increasingly isolated during the Covid pandemic, was led to believe by his sycophantic lieutenants that a quick war would promptly topple the Kyiv government and herd Ukraine back into the fold, and that the West was too far gone to do anything about it.


Following the pattern outlined by Gaidar, Putin has responded to setbacks by demanding ever more sacrifice from the Russians for an ever crueller war. But as his predecessors discovered, to their grief, the patience of their nation is not boundless. -- The New York Times


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