I will detour for a moment because this is where I often used to see interviewers and pundits roll their eyes. The phrase “But Putin is no Hitler!” formed on their lips before I’d finished saying the word “Berlin.” It is a fascinating and dangerous development in historical ignorance that nearly any mention of Hitler or the Nazis is now ritually scoffed at, from professional journalists to anonymous tweets. It’s as if the slow and public evolution of a German populist politician into history’s most infamous monster is beyond rational contemplation.
I’m very aware of the dangers of comparing anything bad to the Nazis or Hitler, or everything repressive to fascism, or every act of appeasement to Munich. Overuse leads to trivialization and the loss of meaning, which is also why “genocide” and “Holocaust” must be reserved for very specific things instead of used casually or for shock value. This is the very heart of “Never again” and it must not be forgotten. This is why President Obama’s seven-year streak of breaking his 2008 campaign promise to recognize the Armenian genocide matters. How can we fight against the many evils present in our world today if we do not have the courage to face an evil whose ghosts are a century old? So we must be honest and we must be brave enough to call evil by its name, especially the mother of all twentieth-century genocides.
And so it is not at all lightly that I compare a modern one-man dictatorship spreading fascist propaganda to a previous one when it annexes a chunk of a European neighbor on exactly the same pretext of “protecting our blood brothers.” It is not out of ignorance or a desire to shock that I compare the cowardice and conciliation displayed today by the leaders of the free world toward Putin with the desperate, futile, and ultimately ruinous appeasement policies of the 1930s toward Hitler. These are coherent and dangerous precedents, not trivial comparisons of two diminutive autocrats each with a penchant for profanity.
Of course the evil of the Nazis defies rational comparison. Of course no one can rival the murderous fiend Hitler became in the 1940s, or the horrors he produced. Of course no one assumes a new world war or an attempt to emulate the Holocaust. But summarily discarding the lessons of Hitler’s political rise, how he wielded power, and how he was disregarded and abetted for so long is foolish and dangerous. And as I said in the introduction, back in 1936 even Hitler was no Hitler. He was already viewed with suspicion by many inside and outside Germany, yes, but he stood beaming in that Berlin Olympic stadium and received accolades from world leaders and stiff-armed salutes from the world’s athletes. There is no doubt that this triumph on the world stage emboldened the Nazis and strengthened their ambitions.
Intentionally or not, the Putin regime followed the Berlin 1936 playbook quite closely for Sochi. There were the same token concessions in response to international outcries over bigoted laws. A few prominent political prisoners were released right before the journalists arrived. Even the tone of the propaganda had a very familiar ring, as brilliantly illustrated by the writer and journalist Viktor Shenderovich. He quoted a statement by Putin loyalist politician Vladimir Yakunin accusing the Western media of anti-Russian hysteria and hostility and condemning these foreign critics for attempting to disrupt the Olympics. Shenderovich then revealed that half of the statement was actually by Karl Ritter von Halt, the organizer of the Berlin Games, only substituting “Russia” for “Germany” throughout. The transition was seamless.
At the end of February 2014, for the second time in six years, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops across an internationally recognized border to occupy territory. This fact must be stated plainly before any discussion of motives or consequences. Russian troops took Ukrainian Crimea by force, and also assisted with the evacuation there of Viktor Yanukovych. This act made Putin a member of an exclusive club, along with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, as one of the very few leaders to invade a neighboring nation in the nuclear age. A few weeks later Putin outdid Milosevic by formally annexing Crimea, as Hussein did with Kuwait.
Such raw expansionist aggression had been out of fashion since the time of Adolf Hitler, who eventually failed, and Joseph Stalin, who succeeded. Stalin’s Red Army had its share of battlefield glory, but his real triumph came at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, three months before the end of the war in Europe. There Stalin bullied a feeble Franklin Roosevelt and a powerless Winston Churchill, redrawing the Polish borders and promising elections in Poland when he knew that the Communist government the Soviets were installing was there to stay.
Although it is a poignant coincidence, there is more to this look back to World War II than the fact that Yalta is located in Crimea. Putin’s tactics are easily, and accurately, compared to those of the Austrian Anschluss and the Nazi occupation and annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938. There was the same rhetoric about protecting a threatened population, the same propaganda filled with lies, justifications, and accusations. Putin also followed the Stalin model on Poland in Yalta: first invade, then negotiate.
Crimea was forced to hold a sham referendum over joining Russia a few weeks later, a vote that took place on the Kremlin’s preferred terms, at the point of a gun and with the result never in doubt. That Crimeans had already voted in the past to stay part of Ukraine did not come up.
Putin’s move in Crimea came just hours after then-Ukrainian president Yanukovych scrambled up his puppet strings from Kyiv to his master’s hand in Russia. He left behind thousands of papers and a few palaces, evidence of the vast scale of his personal and political corruption. His ejection, bought in blood by the courageous people of Ukraine, made Putin look weak. Like any schoolyard bully or crime boss, Putin immediately found a way to look and feel tough again. The historically pivotal Crimean peninsula, with its large Russia-leaning population and geographic vulnerability (and a Russian naval base), was a natural target.
As I have said for years, it is a waste of time to attempt to discern deep strategy in Mr. Putin’s actions. There are no complex national interests in his calculations. There are only personal interests, the interests of those close to him who keep him in power, and how best to consolidate that power. Without real elections or a free media, the only way a dictator can communicate with his subjects is through propaganda and the only way he can validate his power is with regular shows of force.
Inside Russia, that force is brought forth against dissidents and civil rights. Abroad, force in the form of military action, trade sanctions, or economic extortion is applied wherever Putin thinks he can get away with it. So far, that has been quite often and so far, Putin has been right.
Despite the predictions of many pundits, politicians, and so-called experts, Putin formally annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea. Perhaps Putin was not impressed by these critics’ sound reasoning and elegant discourse on how his invasion and annexation were against Russian national interests. The main problem with what we can call the “Putin would never” arguments in the West is that they assume Putin and his ruling elite care about Russian national interests. They do not, except in the few areas where they overlap with their own goal of looting as much cash and treasure from the country as possible. It is long past time to stop listening to Harvard professors and think-tank experts lecture us about what Putin would never do and high time to respond to what he is actually doing.