For Putin to have risked transforming Russia from a petrostate into a twenty-first-century diversified economy would have created a hazardous transition in which his own grip on power could have been lost. Power would have had to be delegated and decentralized, endangering Putin’s position at the apex of the “power vertical.” His various constituencies from pensioners to power elite must feel secure and must receive their accustomed share of the wealth. Such a system runs on loyalty and corruption. It has been said of Russia that the system is not corrupt but rather corruption is the system. And that is because no one feels a stake in the system, which inspires no sense of solidity, dependability, longevity—it can all be gone in the blink of history’s eye. And Putin’s chance to truly reform his country was also gone in the blink of that same eye.
Oil is termed a wasting asset because, once used, it can never be replaced. Still, some substitutes can be found. It is time that is the ultimate wasting asset. And the one Putin so wrongfully squandered.
7
THE HEART OF THE MATTER: UKRAINE
In geopolitics, the past never dies, and there is no modern world.
“You have to understand, George,” said Putin to Bush at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, “Ukraine isn’t even a real country.”[254]
It is not only Putin but millions of other Russians, from workers to intellectuals, who share that sentiment. Discussing Russians and Ukrainians, even former president Mikhail Gorbachev said: “It might not be a scientific fact but we are one people.”[255]
That attitude has two very different aspects—one is a mélange of history, mythology, and emotion, while the other is cool, practical, pure geopolitik.
For generations it was drummed into every Russia schoolchild’s head that Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. In fact, Russia’s two great foundation myths are centered on Kiev and Ukraine. The ancient Chronicles report that around 860 the forever-warring Russian princes sent an envoy to the Vikings with the following plea: “Our land is vast and rich, but there is no order in it. Come and rule over us.”[256] The second sentence—“Come and rule over us”—is disingenuous. In all probability, the Vikings had already conquered the country, and the chronicler was using verbal sleight of hand to turn invasion into invitation.
The other foundation myth concerns the conversion of Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 988. Vladimir himself was baptized in Crimea, and more than a thousand years later Putin would use that fact as one of his justifications for the annexation of that territory, calling that land “sacred.”[257] When word went out for the mass baptism of his subjects in Kiev, Vladimir made himself quite clear on the point: “If anyone does not come, let him consider himself my enemy.”[258]
Had it not been for Genghis Khan’s Mongol Horde that overran the lands of the Eastern and Southern Slavs in the early 1200s, it might well have been a Ukrainian leader confiding to President Bush: “You know, George, Russia is not even a real country.”
The some 250 years between Vladimir’s baptism and the violent arrival of the Mongols is claimed by both Ukrainians and Russians as their happy childhood. Subsequent miseries may have cast too bright a light on the whitewashed walls and golden cupolas of ancient Kiev, yet contemporaries describe the city as architecturally splendid. The art of icon painting swiftly reached a high level. Bards with stringed instruments sang epics that still read well on the page. An enlightened system of laws was in effect, with fines playing a greater role than corporal punishment or incarceration. A Kievan princess married King Henry I of France and, proving the only literate one in the family, began signing her name to official documents to which the king would append his royal, analphabetic mark.
The main problems were discord among the princes—no order in the land—and the still only intermittent raids from the horsemen of the Central Asian steppe.
Speaking of Bukhara’s rulers, “they must be very sinful,” said Genghis Khan, “otherwise God would not have sent a punishment like me down upon” them.[259] The Mongols’ usual MO was to offer a city the chance to surrender, and in return for 10 percent of their wealth and their sworn obedience, the people’s lives and their city would be spared. But sometimes the Mongols would simply destroy a city without even first making any such offer so that the terror of that example would spread like prairie fire. That appears to be what happened to Kiev, which was torched and sacked. A victory feast was arranged—still alive, the captured Kievan princes were laid out on the ground, then covered with planks and rugs on top of which banquet tables and benches were placed. The Mongols then held their victory feast to the music of screams and breaking bones.
Much of the surviving population fled north to other cities or into the forests, where the Mongols lost their advantages of horsemanship and marksmanship with their long and excellently engineered bows (even their arrows were notched in such a way as to make it impossible for the enemy to reuse them.)
The Mongols disliked forests and cities. Genghis Khan, who said that he “hated luxury,” thought a Mongol best off either in the saddle, using his stirrups, a Mongol invention, to fire more accurately, or in an encampment of yurts on the open steppe. That is how Crimea was originally settled by Tatars, a tribe allied with the Mongols. The Russians preferred the term Tatar, so the years of Mongol domination are called the “Tatar yoke.” Under Stalin the entire Tatar population of the Crimea was exiled en masse to Siberia for supposed treason, and it took the Crimean Tatars the better part of twenty years to get back home. They are now suffering under Russian rule in annexed Crimea and have been involved in partisan-like tactics, e.g., the destruction of four electricity pylons in late November 2015 that put the entire Crimea in the dark. In Russia all stories are old stories, the problem is they won’t stay old.
A mystic who worshipped the Eternal Blue Sky, Genghis Khan was quite tolerant when it came to local religions, having none of the iconoclasm of the Kievans themselves. He was known as much for his tolerance as for his savagery. Gibbon, in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, said of Genghis Khan’s tolerance: “The Catholic inquisitors of Europe who defended nonsense by cruelty, might have been confounded by the example of a barbarian, who anticipated the lessons of philosophy and established by his laws a system of pure theism and perfect toleration.”[260]
That “perfect toleration” meant that the Orthodox Church now began to play a role as the keeper of historical memory, especially in the Chronicles compiled by monks, and as a haven of uplifting beauty amid the scorched earth. In Soviet times the Russian Orthodox Church would again offer a sanctuary of beauty amid the brutalist gray-cement architecture of advanced socialism. And it is now one of the pillars that supports the House of Putin.
The Mongols dominated Russia for something like two and a half centuries (1240–1500) but continued to pose a serious danger well after that. St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, the very symbol of Russia, was built in the 1550s by Tsar Ivan the Terrible to commemorate his victory over the Tatar stronghold of Kazan in 1552.
254
“Putin Hints at Splitting Up Ukraine,”
255
Ivan Nechepurenko, “Gorbachev on Russia and Ukraine,”
257
“Putin Says Crimea Sacred, Attacks US, EU over Ukraine,”
259
Jack Weatherford,
260
Edward Gibbon,