Photo by Cody West on Unsplash
by framersqool:
Interestingly enough, though my personal point of view holds unambiguously that Ukraine has every right to demand every scintilla of the Ten Points be fulfilled before the war as a whole can be regarded as being truly finished, I have not really become much more interested in Ukraine itself than I was before.
I have certainly learned a lot about their history and have become an admirer of what appears to be a genuine commitment on the part of their military personnel to fighting for something they have no doubts or reservations about and their overall society for managing an ongoing crisis in the ways they seem to have done.
But I am a lifelong self-taught student of Russian history, and my focus continues to be on Russian affairs, much more than Ukrainian. As such, I have my own reasons to believe that the Putin cult and the nationwide apparatus supporting it is more of a structural evil than even the most 'slava Ukraini' flag-wavers even suspect.
Just as an illustration to extend this point of view, I usually watch Anna from Ukraine's videos each day, mostly just because she seems like someone I would like and enjoy the company of if I knew her in person and because she seems sincere in her wartime patriotism and her love for her native land in general.
(She is, curiously, from Lutsk, a city well within Polish territory until..... Molotov-Ribbentrop was signed in 1939, and thereafter the Red Army duly took up positions in Polish territory to cover the German eastern flank that September; during the twenty-one months between the pact taking effect and the German betrayal and invasion of the USSR, the Stalinist state undertook to re-draw borders at will within the Soviet zone codified under the treaty with Germany. Part of this was to place much of what was then eastern Poland into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and create a new Polish border much further west.... in effect, the fact that Anna Danylchuk in 2023 is Ukrainian and not Polish was directly Comrade Stalin's doing....)
But Anna's severe case of Russia hatred does tend to compromise her as a commentator, to put it mildly. She often speaks of various matters of both Russian and Soviet history. To my initial surprise, she is so blinded by harsh judgment and dismissiveness that her Russian history skills are actually not all that well-developed. Her contempt for anything having to do with Russia outshouts any sense of a realistic future living next door to a country that is not just going to cease to exist, no matter how this war ends.
The cognitive dissonance she must have to live within knowing that a despot from Georgia who ruled Russia a century ago was who made her a Ukrainian and not a Pole by starving and executing millions of both nationalities and moving lines around on a map by personal whim, must have something to do with her tendency toward excess in trumpeting the Ukrainian national character, as though in her heart she feels a need to prove she is Ukrainian at all.
But back to things Russian, the problem I am having with the entire attempt at a public dialogue in the West about this war is that the history of that entire part of the world is far, far more complex than anyone seems to be willing to confront.
At every stage, in every land, and throughout all the centuries, there has been an excess of brutality and a dire shortage of Good Guys in the ways the various states and nationalities have dealt with each other. Just wailing 'Ukraine good, Russia bad' doesn't help anyone come to informed conclusions.
But also, as a student of Russian history, I feel I can assure you that the Putin state is far worse than you might think possible and not at all just one man's creation.
The Russia that emerged from the ashes of the USSR in the 1990s didn't just stop being the Soviet Union in all but name overnight, and I can similarly assure you that when Reagan called the USSR an evil empire, even he didn't know the half of it. Putin and the longstanding traditions of Russian rule are a perfect fit for each other: a man and a style of leadership entirely bereft of any redeeming qualities in either the moral or the political sense and a nation which has absolutely zero traditions of ever requiring any such qualities of its strongman bosses.
Think of it this way if it helps: when Al Capone and his thugs ruled Chicago, their predictable and continual corruption and brutality didn't make everyone else in Chicago a bad person by default, but if you had business in Chicago back then, it would have been a safe bet that anyone you encountered was probably in Capone's pocket one way or another, and not to assume as much by default would probably be the last mistake you ever made.
I think the West really does need to come to full grips with this idea of Russia, and the Putin apparatus, as exactly what they are: a mafia state, a nation ruled by gangsters.
I've said before and will say again that this is not a metaphor or an epithet; it is a literal and accurate summary of what Russia today is and has been since long before Lenin ever boarded that sealed train.
And no, this does not make all Russians bad people, nor is all Russian reality an inherent and comprehensive evil.
Neither history nor evil itself has ever afforded us any such luxury of oversimplification.
But the fact remains that anyone dealing with anything to do with today's Russia, whether in business or sport or tourism or Russian expatriates or international diplomacy or in any other way, is dealing with the long arm and thoroughly amoral unscrupulousness and duplicity of the Putin cult, which is, yes, far more evil and dangerous than you can even imagine.
And again, history is unpredictable.
I have long agreed with Snyder's thesis that the Soviet state under Stalin was, in fact, a far more psychotic and homicidal regime than the Third Reich. We must remember what few saw coming in those times: an eventuality that would land the United States and all its armed might on Stalin's side, with Stalin dictating the terms, in a world war.
Not to accept Putin and the current Russian state as a dangerous evil, in unambiguous terms and with our own moral certitude to match, is to risk a future where the USA and the Putin Kremlin end up on the same side.
If events had taken a few different turns than they did following 9/11, this might have already occurred, and this pointless and destructive 'war on terror' everyone is ready to forget about now would have been a joint Kremlin-White House project in anti-Islamic pogrom-ing from central Africa to western Siberia and across much of the Asian Pacific regions. That cretin Bush the Younger was taken in under the Putin spell even back then. I'm not even entirely clear on why Putin didn't take even further advantage of Junior Bush's naive stupidity than he did.
But for all that, remember my thoughts about the mystique of strategic genius.
For all his evil ways, so clearly annotated in the annals of this entire century, Putin is still just a man and not a force of nature.
The rest of that mystique is almost entirely a Western creation, with the standard portrayal of all things Russian in media and entertainment for years now involving that very mystique of an impossibly clever and deceptive form of evil that always manages to be several moves ahead of the Good Guys, and which fills our hearts with mortal dread just to see that smug look of assured victory on their Russkie faces.
By over-rating the degree of genius behind Russia's currently evil status of statehood, we tend to under-rate the actual threats it poses.
Evil does not require genius to manifest itself, only fear.
The thing I admire the Ukrainians for is that they are the one people on earth willing to stand up and fight back against Russian evil and no longer cower in terror before its smoke and mirrors at all. Any Ukrainian today can tell you this had been their worst mistake since statehood in 1991 and that they are done with making it any longer.
Say what you must about Ukrainian deceptions and propaganda in its efforts to keep a very shaky coalition intact and support its war effort, but there must be no doubt that their enemy is every bit as dangerous and bent on further destruction as they say it is.
I didn't get that view from Ukrainian or pro-Ukrainian propaganda (neither of which I pay more than passing attention to); it's a hypothesis about the realities of Russia I have been trying and failing to disprove for much of my life.
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.