Maybe. I’m unconvinced - most especially because it’s hard to imagine that every Russian leader will necessarily be so catastrophically stupid as to start a war of choice that will likely doom their reign. There’s got to be a version of Putin out there that doesn’t invade Ukraine because he knows he’ll get his ass kicked.
In any case, we agree that we should give Ukraine all the weapons and supplies they need to expel Russian forces from all their territory.
Yeah, the assertion that here is Putin and there is Russia and they are two distinct characters is completely at odds with the fact that until recently Putin had very high approval throughout the Russian population (and not just in polls run by state-run ‘news’ outlets) and even now is still broadly supported by the people who aren’t vigorously fleeing into Estonia, Latvia, and Finland. And when Russians had the choice for a democrat-ish leader, they condemned him basically at the first sign of faltering and made a hard turn back toward strong autocracy because that is what they have always known.
You say, “I’m not an expert on Russian culture,” but then continue to insist that “People are people,” without any apparent point of reference even when contested by a poster who has actually lived in Russia. I’m not an expert on Russia, either, but I’ve not only read about Russian history and culture but I’ve worked with Russians. The two characteristics that describe them are “fatalistic” and “paranoid”; whether it is about corruption (endemic in Russia from the Tsarist era through Communism and in full bloom post-Cold War), the law (officials will do what they want, so keep your head down and have your bribe handy), or the future (dire and hopeless, just like the past), they just expect the world to go to shit, and quite frankly for the typical Russian this maps pretty much exactly to their experience. When the Russians (and Ukrainians) I knew came here and went to the grocery store for the first time, they were absolutely convinced that the wide variety of available food was some kind of Potemkin village show put on to impress them because who would have so much fresh produce and prepared foods just sitting out where anybody could grab and take it. And this wasn’t 1991, right after the fall of the Soviet Union; this was a full decade after Russians had direct exposure to the free market economies of Europe.
This insistence that the “foundations of [your] beliefs” should dictate that all people are fundamentally the same doesn’t really hold water upon first contact with the distinctions between cultures. Putin is very much a representative of Russian cultural thought, and not even the most extreme example of it.
Stranger
There is some quote by Peter the Great that I can’t Google about Russians needing to be led and dominated.
Quite possibly - now. But you’re viewing the situation with hindsight. If Putin knew then what he knows now, I am absolutely 100% convinced he would choose not to invade. I refuse to believe he is that stupid. He suffers from hubris, not senile dementia (well…maybe). However this war ends he has made life much harder for himself and tarnished his carefully cultivated image as a political genius and the would be mastermind behind an eventual reconstructed Soviet empire.
But 2022 Putin didn’t know this would be a shit show. Hell, MOST people, including those specifically paid to know better, thought it wouldn’t be this level of a shit show for the Russians. What little has filtered out has indicated that Putin was furious that he was misled because his corrupt, nervous subordinates didn’t give him a truly accurate intelligence briefing on the ground situation. And no one thought Russian preparedness, including in all likelihood the Russians, would be this abysmal. The Soviet military, for all its myriad issues, never showed quite this level of composite incompetence in earlier adventures. But the failure of the initial decapitation strike combined with extended high-intensity warfare with a large and determined opponent has laid bare all the structural flaws in the current Russian military (endemic corruption not being the least of them).
Because Russia has been busy with other wars, and because they weren’t ready to go until a year ago.
I suspect, too, that Putin and his goons were thinking it possible the occupation of Ukraine combined with their support for Russian rebels n the Donbas might break Ukraine.
The characterization of Russian culture as a paranoid, xenophobic one is not some little bit of bigotry Stranger and Sam are prone to; it’s a very, very well documented facet of Russian culture, one that virtually all historians of Russian history, or of things involving Russia (like the world wars) comment upon. As I think Keegan put it, “the Russians, however, always assumed that everyone was trying to fool them and so they had to fool everyone first.”
The assumption that Russia is being irrational may be wrong; to be irrational is to act in a manner counter to your interests, but it may be Russia is acting in a manner they truly, honestly believe is necessary. We know NATO would not dream of actually attacking Russia. They don’t get that. Let me ask you something: who said this?
Who’s that? Putin, right? Some stooge of his? No, that’s Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the dissident, seen as a hero by the West. Even he was convinced the world was out to get Russia.
Of course a Czar would say something like that. But, Russia has a history of being attacked. They have an entire internal mythology based on them being the savior of European civilization and getting zero credit in return. The Mongols, Napolean, Hitler. And then what does an ungrateful Europe do? It sides with the Americans now. Not all Russians, obviously.
Culture is hard to change, but I think that Russia being rendered completely impotent might be the impetus needed to change it.
Which, of course, doesn’t change the immediate goal of kicking Russian butts until every one of those butts is either out of Ukraine or six feet under it. Whether that serves to change Russian culture or not, it’s still the necessary next step.
Just in case anyone didn’t see this in the Pit thread,
“That is why it is so important to achieve all the goals of the special military operation. To push back the borders that threaten our country as far as possible, even if they are the borders of Poland,” said Medvedev.
I’m an American. IIRC you are too.
Do you agree there are cultural differences between a US Southern small-town redneck MAGA Q-Anon enthusiast and a granola eating lefty in Berkeley, California? Of course you do.
But deep down they are both humans. But they each have a very different idea of what’s important and what’s not, what’s true and what’s not. They are each products of their environment. And given a particular situation and stimulus, they’ll each come to different conclusions about why <whatever> happened and what to do about it.
Heck, most Americans accept on face value the idea that Japanese culture is more collective than ours; fitting in with the group is more important than individual choice. The cliché is that their favorite saying is “The nail that sticks up gets pounded down” whereas ours is “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Same stimulus but opposite conclusions about what happens next. Yet we all also agree that Japanese are the same humans as we are: homo sapiens through and through.
We all can certainly bicker about the details of US, Japanese, and Russian culture. And what that suggests for the future trajectory of our respective societies. But to assert that there is no such thing as culture, or that culture has no consequences on behavior is … confusing.
But none of that is destiny, or fate, etc. None of it means that people of certain cultures are doomed to necessarily make the same mistakes again and again, and nothing can be done about it. People are people – influenced by culture, systems, and institutions, to be sure, but also with the potential to do things differently. And, on a macro level, regardless of these cultures, systems, and institutions, people want to have enough to eat, take care of their families, see a decent future for their kids, etc., in general, far more than they desire to dominate and hurt others.
Culture is important, but that doesn’t mean that Russia is forever doomed to pointless and stupid invasions of other countries.
I don’t know why this would be controversial. Hopefully things will change. In the meantime, we should do everything we can to help Ukraine win the war.
Sure, but it seems rather rare for a culture/nation to do this themselves.
Germany and Japan did so post-WWII because they were both fully conquered and occupied by the Allies who more or less forced them to de-Nazify and become pacifist.
Nobody’s ever going to conquer Russia and occupy them, so what’s likely to happen when Russia loses is that it’ll be like a post-WW1 Germany that’s licking its wounds in anger (but, unlike Germany, probably unable to arm up to the point of doing a WW2.) If Russia stops being “doomed to pointless and stupid invasions,” it won’t be because it doesn’t want to invade, it’ll be because it can’t. But the desire will be there for a long time to come.
It’s not that they can’t change. It’s that the pace of change will be glacial. As in taking a century or two, given favorable circumstances and favorable motivations. And even longer given unfavorable circumstances.
Which means for the practical short term of your and my and our childrens’ lives, there won’t be (much) change.
Germany wasn’t nutso nihilist in 1900 or 1910. So rapidly recovering from their temporary insanity from ~1935-1945 was fairly easy. Doubly so given that the USA was underwriting ensuring the populace did not starve and there were no roving warlord bands, and the infrastructure was promptly rebuilt.
Japan was a slightly different story, where the public was still pretty used to following the Emperor’s orders, but we managed to persuade the Emperor to embrace sensible, and the populace duly followed. And we did do all the things necessary to ensure public safety and economic recovery before the next populist despot arose. As they inevitably will anywhere on Earth when / where times are hard.
We skipped all 4 of those steps (“temporary”, plus 3 kinds of post-defeat support) in Iraq and look what happened.
Turning to Russia now:
The hard part for the West is how to both prevent Russia from causing external harm for the next 50-200 years while simultaneously actively stimulating change towards normalcy and supporting their populace as they make the transition from culturally pariah to culturally productive. Hard to sell to both US / Western taxpayers and to Russians legitimately fearful of what looks to them like cultural imperialism but looks to us like raging paranoia.
We’ll have the same problem writ small when NK collapses as it inevitably will.
It’s definitely off topic, but it’s probably worth a debate thread all its own to ask if there are any historical precedents of a country or similar ethnopolitical entity successfully reinventing an obsolete and/or unproductive culture on its own without some outside power forcibly compelling them to do so.
As this is a tangent, I’ll be brief.
Depending on what parameters are involved, then maybe, maybe, the unification of Germany in 1871. It sort of created a modern nation state while keeping the monarchy of Prussia intact.
This Twitter thread seems to be going around as a source for China’s peace proposals:
The commentator is saying that Ukraine will be required to cede territory and will require talks between Russia and NATO (Ukraine not mentioned)
A partition would be required to be negotiated (so this map is just illustrative)
If this is the plan it is utterly ridiculous. Designed perhaps to show that Ukraine is ‘rejecting peace’ as there is not a chance in hell they would accept this.
Zelensy wants to meet Xi, but he will do well not to get angry with him and push the Chinese further into Russia’s arms.
Here is the Chinese proposal straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak: China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis (fmprc.gov.cn)
I’ll always wonder if the Chinese Foreign Ministry came at all from a starting point of #9 Facilitating grain export. Selling food seems like a base motivation to me but the logistics of universal Black Sea access in the middle of war are complex. No cite for this view of course.
So an East Kyiv and West Kyiv. That usually doesn’t turn out so well. The proposal is madness.
Russia needs to withdraw and rebuild UKN.
I’m sorry that the Russian people will suffer for this. But total sanctions. Everything. Perhaps then they will remove Putin.
Yes split city’s hardly worked out before. Even the peacetime examples are hard to organize. I like that Beijing made an attempt, that they went to the trouble.
OK, I can see someone proposing a split with a “demilitarized zone” and so on, but this? Extending the DMZ all the way to half of Kyiv, even though Russian forces were never able to get anywhere near there? That’s not “a starting point for negotiations” or even “a naive misunderstanding of the situation”; that’s just pure trolling.