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THE RUSSIA PUTIN INHERITED AND ITS SPIRITUAL ILLS
Few lamented the demise of the Soviet Union more than Vladimir Putin; none benefited from it more.
The man who in his state-of-the-nation speech on April 25, 2005, called the collapse of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” was propelled from an obscure KGB posting in East Germany to the leadership of twenty-first-century Russia by the very forces unleashed by that collapse. Had the Center held and the Soviet Union remained essentially intact, today Putin would be a KGB retiree with a thickening waist and thinning hair, out fishing on a quiet river or pestering his grandchildren with kisses. Instead, in one capacity or another, he has led the new Russia since the year 2000 and will continue to do so until 2018 at the very least, unless calamity intervenes again, this time not necessarily in his favor.
Though Putin’s fate is singular, in some ways it resembles that of those who were born and grew up under the old Soviet dispensation and were forced to reinvent themselves when their world gave way around them. There was a no-man’s-land between the last Soviet generation and the first real post-Soviet one. A woman who had done well in real estate told me her mother was continually berating her: “You help a fellow human being find a place to live and for that you take money!?”
Both in being nostalgic for the USSR and in facing the need to reinvent himself, Putin is ordinary. Russians sense that ordinariness and are comforted by it. That is of course especially true for Putin’s main electoral demographic, older working-class types who do not live in central Moscow or St. Petersburg but on the outskirts and are strung out across the country’s eleven time zones. A good many of those voters are even more nostalgic for the Soviet Union than Putin. They yearn for the cozy democracy of poverty, for cheap rent, cheap utilities, free schools, and free health care, and find the hurly-burly of the marketplace vulgar, alien, and confusing.
For Putin and everyone else the fall of the USSR came as a shock because no one saw it coming. For most people in the 1980s the USSR had always existed during their lifetime, and the opposition between the USA and the USSR was part of the architecture of reality, even its keystone. The United States and the USSR seemed interlocked, as if MAD stood not only for mutual assured destruction but mutual assured duration. The only likely end to the dynamic impasse of U.S.-Soviet relations was nuclear war. That was certainly easier to imagine than the Marxist fantasy of the withering away of the state or what in fact happened, the soft and largely bloodless implosion of the largest empire the world had ever seen.
The events of 9/11 were formative for the United States, or perhaps deformative is a better word. The Middle Eastern wars, the debate over drone strikes, Guantánomo, surveillance, torture, liberty vs. security, everything that has bedeviled America since 2001, flows directly from that date and those incidents.
The fall of the Soviet Union was also formative in that way. Russians watched with a similar amazed horror as their own society collapsed with all the helplessness of a bad dream. First, it was the Soviet empire that was disintegrating, the nations that were never part of the Soviet Union itself, but always under Kremlin control. Those countries had only been in the Soviet dominion since the end of World War II and had never made any secret of their reluctance to be there, rebelling every twelve years—Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1980. Later when he was criticized for giving away the farm, i.e., Eastern Europe, Gorbachev testily replied: “I gave Poland to the Poles. Who else should I give it to?”[181] To that rhetorical question the imperialist answer is: “No one.”
But to see cracks spreading through the edifice of the Eastern Bloc was one thing; to see them spread to the Soviet Union itself was quite another. Even the loss of the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania—could somehow be justified: culturally and historically they belonged to Europe and had initially been acquired as part of the dirty deal, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, that Stalin struck with Hitler in 1939. But it was unthinkable that Kazakhstan could be lost, Kazakhstan with its enormous prairies and wheat fields, its oil, uranium, and gold, its launching platforms from which the Soviets had sent the first Sputnik, dog, and male and female cosmonauts, into space. Even more unthinkable was that Ukraine could be lost. Kazakhstan may have been conquered and settled by Russians, but, to the Russian mind, Ukraine was Russia. All Russian history flowed from Kiev. Every schoolchild learned: Kiev is the mother of Russian cities, Ukraine is Russia’s breadbasket.
And the losses weren’t only emotional and symbolic. Ukraine was rich in coal, industry, agriculture. It had the port where the Black Sea Fleet was stationed, it had the only shipyard where aircraft carriers were built. Even Kazakhstan might in the end be arguable. But Kazakhstan was lost. And so was Ukraine.
It all seemed impossible, incredible. But as Putin put it: “There’s a lot that seems impossible and incredible and then—bang! Look what happened to the Soviet Union. Who could have imagined that it would simply collapse? No one saw that coming—even in their worst nightmares.”[182]
The loss was indeed catastrophic. The USSR’s population had been somewhat over 300,000,000. Now Russia was down to half that, with its population continuing to fall for years, 170 people dying for every 100 babies born. The country was losing the equivalent of a San Francisco a year to alcohol, heart attacks, car wrecks, suicide.
The economic losses were immense not only in and of themselves, but in their consequences. The centralized command-and-control economy dictated where certain machines or parts were to be produced; many were concentrated in places that had now broken away. That system had never worked well anyway, and now that parts had to be not only shipped but imported, things only grew worse. The military losses were also immense. Both Tsarist and Soviet Russia had been known for their huge standing armies, but now there were 150,000,000 fewer people to draw from.
And over it all hung the malodorous air of farce and fiasco, defeat and disgrace. To make matters worse, the United States and the West were not only now the victors in the Cold War; they also wanted to take credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his book Heroes British historian Paul Johnson epitomizes what was for Russians the West’s unbearable preening and triumphalist self-love: “Three people won the Cold War, dismantled the Soviet empire and eliminated Communism as a malevolent world force: Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.”[183] As if the writings of Solzhenitsyn, the actions of Sakharov, and the decisions of Gorbachev had not played the slightest part whatsoever. The actual physical losses—territory, population, agriculture, industry, space, and military—were horrendous enough, but the incessant crowing of the West was galling beyond measure.
In an ornate tsarist palace turned high-tech gym in St. Petersburg I had a conversation with a Russian gangster who, behind his very broad back, was called simply “Tank.” But his mind was sharp and he liked to sprinkle the occasional English phrase into his conversation. He took a very Darwinian view of power and the relations between states—to the victor the spoils and to the loser bitter humiliation. Speaking of the Cold War in particular, he said: “You won, we lost. We have to bow down to you. You have the right to teach us how to live.”
That same sense of humiliation, which Thomas Friedman has called “the single most underestimated force in international relations,”[184] was present in President Yeltsin’s voice when he exclaimed to President Clinton: “Russia isn’t Haiti!”[185] The Russia Hand by Clinton’s Russian adviser Strobe Talbott records Russian foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev saying in regard to the U.S. bombing of Serbia: “You know, it’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders!”[186]
181
Gorbachev press conference, July 21, 2015, AP Archive. Also “Gorbachev Denounces Putin on Rights and Corruption,”