What unites the time travelers is their rejection of modernity, their fear and hatred of what we should simply call “modern values” to replace the obsolete and condescending term “Western values.”
Globalization has brought these relics into contact and competition with the modern world that threatens to destroy their environments and authority. This contact also provides them with markets for their natural resources and with the technology they use for murder and repression, so they cannot disengage entirely. The time travelers cannot fight head to head with the ideas and prosperity of the free world, so they use the only weapons they have: ideology, violence, and disregard for the value of human life. They combat the lure of free speech and free markets with irrationality: radical religion and nationalism, cults of personality and dogma, hatred and fear.
Despite the denials of many politicians and pundits it is quite possible to lose a fight you refuse to acknowledge you are in. Even worse, ignoring the reality of the conflict puts more innocent victims on the front lines instead of trained soldiers and law enforcement. There are no easy solutions for homegrown terrorists or nuclear-armed dictators, but we must begin by ending this culture of denial.
I’ve argued elsewhere that history is cyclical; it turned out that the great victory for democracy was not eternal but seasonal. It just took time for the backlash to manifest against our excessive optimism. The mullahs, monarchs, and dictators are pushing back against the threat to their medieval ecosystems. This is the common thread connecting Putin’s attack on Ukraine and the murderous Islam-derived ideology that drives al-Qaeda and ISIS, and that drove the Kouachi brothers in Paris and so many others like them. They are pushing back against the modern world, brutally demonstrating the fallacy of “the end of history.” Our goal must be to help those stuck in the past to join the present, and it cannot be done only by force. We must be sincere and make an overwhelmingly attractive case. But this does not mean coddling or tolerating violent extremists or those who create them, at home or abroad. An open society that cannot defend its citizens will not be open for very long. A society that won’t fight for freedom will lose it, a truth immortalized by Reagan’s statement that freedom “is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
Symbols matter in this fight, symbols like Charlie Hebdo and the “Bring Back Our Girls” campaigns, and photographs of world leaders marching together for free speech. It is not enough to tell our immigrants, our citizens, and the billions of souls still living in the unfree world that these ideals matter; we must show them. The terrorists and their teachers and the dictators and their enablers are quick to point out every hypocrisy, every double standard. We cannot compromise for, as Victor Hugo wrote in Les Travailleurs de la Mer, “Men grow accustomed to poison by degrees.”
Boris Nemtsov, my longtime friend and colleague in the Russian opposition, was murdered in cold blood in the middle of Moscow on February 27, 2015. Four bullets in the back ended his life in sight of the Kremlin, where he once worked as Boris Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister. Photos from the scene showed a cleaning crew scrubbing his blood off the pavement within hours of the murder, so it is not difficult to imagine the quality of the investigation that followed.
Putin actually started, and ended, the inquiry while Boris’s body was still warm by calling the murder a “provocation,” the term of art for suggesting his enemies are murdering one another in order to bring shame upon his innocent brow. He then brazenly sent a message of condolence to Nemtsov’s mother, who often warned her fearless son that his actions could get him killed in Putin’s Russia.
Hours after Boris’s death, reports said that police were raiding his home and confiscating papers and computers. Putin’s enemies are often victims and his victims are always suspects. Boris was a passionate critic of Putin’s war in Ukraine and was about to finish a report on the presence of Russian soldiers in Donbass, a matter the Kremlin has spared no effort to cover up. But “Did Putin give the order?” rings as hollow today as it did when journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in 2006 or when MH17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine last year.
As long as Putin is in office we’ll never know who gave the order, but there is no doubt that he is directly responsible for creating the conditions in which these outrages occur with such terrible frequency. Putin’s early themes of restoring the national pride and structure that were lost with the fall of the USSR have slowly run out of steam and been replaced with a toxic mixture of nationalism, belligerence, and hatred. By 2014, the increasingly depleted opposition movement, long treated with contempt and ridicule, had been rebranded in the Kremlin-dominated media as dangerous fifth columnists, or “national traitors” in the vile language they frequently borrowed from the Nazis.
To match the propaganda, Putin shifted more support to the most repressive, reactionary, and bloodthirsty elements in the regime. Among them are Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov and chief prosecutor Alexander Bastrykin, who recently declared that the Russian constitution was “standing in the way of protecting the state’s interests.” In this environment, blood becomes the coin of the realm, the way to show loyalty to the regime. This is what Putin has wrought in order to keep his grip on power: a culture of death and fear that spans all eleven Russian time zones and is now being exported to Eastern Ukraine.
Boris Nemtsov was a tireless fighter and one of the most skilled critics of the Putin government, a role that was by no means his only possible destiny. A successful mayor in Nizhny Novgorod and a capable cabinet member and parliamentarian, he could have led a comfortable life in the power vertical as a token liberal voice of reform. But Boris was unqualified to work for the Putin regime. He had principles, you see, and could not bear to watch our country descend back into the totalitarian depths.
And so Boris launched his big body, big voice, and big heart into the uphill battle to keep democracy alive in Russia. We worked together after he was kicked out of parliament in 2004 and by 2007 we were close allies in the opposition movement. He was devoted to documenting the crimes and corruption of Putin and his cronies, hoping they would one day face a justice that seemed further away all the time.
Along with a report on Russian soldiers in Ukraine, he had been working hard on the protest march planned for that Sunday in Moscow, a march that became his funeral procession. Boris and I began to quarrel after Putin returned as president in 2012. To me it signaled the end of any realistic hopes that there could be a peaceful political solution to regime change in Russia. But Boris was always hopeful. He would tell me I was too rash, that “you have to live a long time to see change in Russia.” Now he will never see it.
We cannot know exactly what horror will come next, only that there will be another and another as long as Putin remains in power. The only way Putin’s rule will end is if the Russian people and Putin’s elites understand they have no future as long as he is there. Right now, no matter how they really feel about Putin and their lives, they see him as invincible and unmovable. They see him getting his way in Ukraine, taking territory and waging war. They see him talking tough and making deals with Merkel and Hollande. They see his enemies dead in the streets of Moscow.