If you think the Russian people aren’t part of the problem, I advise you read this detailed story about intercepted phone calls between Russian soldiers and their families back home.
When I say “people” I’m obviously not talking about heredity or DNA, but rather cultural beliefs, values, and attitudes held by Russian people. Russian culture is fundamentally imperialist, expansionist, chauvinist, and favors strongman politics, this is readily evident if you read its foundational literature and histories pre-Lenin.
We could easily go into the rabbit hole of “not all Russians”, but it’s safe to say a sufficiently large majority of Russians hold those attitudes and beliefs. So even if Putin is deposed, his successor is likely to be similar to Putin. If somehow a “reformer” like Navalny were installed, he wouldn’t hold power for long unless he pivoted to corrupt strongman politics rather quickly.
Regime change would temporarily interrupt Russia’s current trajectory, but it won’t help in the long run. The rot goes all the way to the bone. Being that it’s morally wrong to annihilate cultures and peoples, the only way responsible way to manage Russia is to contain it. So every time they stick one toe over their border, we cut off two toes. They’ve never responded to any other approach, and never will.
Okay, maybe. That’s about systems and institutions. But “forever” is hyperbole. In any case, this Russia needs to be defeated, and defeated so resoundingly that they have no ability to try this again anytime soon.
There are plenty of educated, progressively minded Russians who hate the current system. The problem is that they are smart enough to know the easiest way to free themselves of it is to just leave. I know at least two Russian designers who are only waiting for their elderly parents to pass away before heading for the border. Money won’t be a problem, because they don’t have anything to buy with it in Russia, anyway. It all goes into a Tibilisi bank account.
Hell, we’re a third of the way already without that. HMS_I was right, Russia is the MAGA of nations and has been since it got large enough to throw its weight around.
The Russians who don’t believe this are leaving if they can, or mostly staying quiet and keeping their heads down. The bulk of Russian people clearly prefer a ‘strong’ leader over a fair one, and the idea of Russia as the capital of the “World Island” and Moscow as “The Third Rome” are deeply entrenched in Russian society just as much as “American exceptionalism” is in the United States. And not to put to fine of a point on it but even the ‘reformer’ Alexei Navanly is a pretty hardcore Russian nationalist and not all that inclined toward democratic principles. He’d probably end this Ukrainian invasion for pragmatic reasons but he’d be no more inclined to buddy up with NATO than Putin is.
Stranger
No, as I explained, it’s about culture. The cultural issues predated current systems and institutions. It has survived multiple revolutions of systems and institutions, and wartime losses of a frankly unimaginable scale. This is because those phenomena are products of culture, and not the other way around. Extreme nationalism, chauvinism, and imperialism is a fundamental part of Russian culture.
I did not use the word “forever” or imply any sort of permanence. I will suggest that Russia will remain as it is indefinitely because its culture has shown it has staying power even in the case of total government revolution and catastrophic loss of life. The magnitude of what Russia went through in the Bolshevik revolution, and later in WWII, is hard to comprehend, yet none of it dislodged their cultural attitudes in the slightest. If anything it seems intensified.
Unless you have a realistic theory of change you’d like to propose, “indefinite” is not hyperbole, it is the best forecast that fits the facts. There is no foreseeable path to eliminating the rot from Russian culture without eliminating a couple billion innocent lives, so the policy has to be firm and vigilant containment, indefinitely.
Absolutely. America is on a dark trajectory regarding exceptionalism and nationalism. If we struggle so mightily with this in an open and democratic society, what hope does a long-standing strongman autocracy like Russia have? I would suggest the answer is somewhere between “zero” and “almost zero”.
Absolutely. I’m unconvinced that Navalny is doing anything except using the West in an attempt to gain power in Russia. And if he does become leader, I would predict that it’s less than a decade before he turns into something resembling Putin. Russian culture, especially the shadow government of international gangsters, won’t tolerate leaders that stray very far from that style.
Many Russians want things to be better in Russia. But they don’t care about better system of government, or better international relations, they just think things will improve if they get a better strongman.
I’m not an expert on Russian culture, but I’ll just say that culture and systems/institutions are closely linked together; the issues you describe are as deeply ingrained in Russian systems and institutions as they are in the culture (and vice versa). Changing one requires changing the other.
I had a British teacher, in University, who taught this. Within the US, I have never heard anyone mention it.
A young generation can turn a culture around in less than a decade. Unfortunately, there are few young people in Russia and many of those are leaving or being fed into a Ukrainian meat grinder.
This video argues that the main reason for Russia’s geopolitical stance is that Russia essentially has no internal lines of defense. Russia is too large, and due to the marginal habitability of much of the country too sparsely populated and too poorly connected for its population to reinforce each other beyond the rail lines. If you can’t hold an invader off at the borders, you’re boned; and those defendable frontiers mostly lie outside of Russia proper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A79uneUEfjM
The Russians have three times the borders and half the population [of the United States]. If they can’t forward position, they die.
What I don’t get, despite others trying to explain, is why they would think there is any kind of threat to begin with. The west no longer produces Napoleons and Hitlers. They really didn’t, and IMHO still don’t, have anything to fear from a western invasion.
They take the long view. There were no threats of invasion in 1930 either, but a decade later… The world is a volatile place, and governments can turn on a dime.
Also, in the modern era you can’t stand up a military overnight by just handing out rifles to conscripts. Modern weapons systems can take a decade or more to develop, so you can’t just look at the threats you face today, but what might come at you ten or twenty years from now.
Half of your allies (The Warsaw Pact) switching allegiance to the other side (NATO) over last 25 years isn’t going to relieve you of any fears you have of invasion. And their primary rival has a recent history of preemptively invading sovereign nations. The threat may not actually be real but it does look real if you are a citizen of an increasingly isolated country.
Perhaps they believe that Western leaders think as they do.
I think even if NATO was only as far east as France, Putin would still have invaded Ukraine. NATO is just his pretext. His war is imperialistic.
Which is why I argue that, for practical reasons, there’s no reason to hope Russia will ever change, meaning that maximally aggressive containment is the only rational policy.
That starts with:
- helping Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova push Russia back to its 2008 borders
- NATO admission for any country who is willing and able to contribute (or a new successor treaty to NATO, since some allies seem to have forgotten that NATO is about containing Russia).
- Maintaining comprehensive sanctions indefinitely. The only path to full sanctions relief would be Russia surrendering all its nuclear weapons. (but we should accept incremental steps toward this aim, lifting a batch of sanctions in exchange for a batch of weapons systems).
Of course it’s unlikely that all of these outcomes would come to pass. Very unlikely that Russia would surrender any of its nukes. That’s not the point. The point is that we signal with unity and clarity that Russian expansionism henceforth will be unsuccessful, costly, and painful. The point is to signal to Russia that capitulation is their only way out of being a pariah state. As I mentioned above, this kind of resolve is the only thing that’s ever worked with Russia.
They aren’t really that wrong. As @Elmer_J.Fudd alluded to, within the last ~20 years the US has invaded and waged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The majority of US citizens were convinced that these wars were necessary for our own protection, while it was clear to the rest of the world that we simply wanted regime change.
We really do think like they do, it just can be tough to see it when we’re the ones being fed the propaganda. And it’s not incomprehensible that we’d ever invade another country because we don’t like their government, given that we’ve done just that.
I’m sure the people of Irak are happy that all those infortunate deaths in 2003-2011 weren’t caused by any Napoleon or Hitler.