By Noah Rothman
Friday, February 09, 2024
By all accounts, Russian president Vladimir Putin is obsessed with history. That was apparent in Putin’s two-hour-long interview with former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson.
Russia’s autocratic president spent the first hour dragging his interlocutor along a languid tour of Russia’s history, beginning at the first East Slavic state in 862 and continuing into the modern era, with many detours along the way. Just as he did at the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin dwelled on Kyivan Rus, the Tartar Yoke, the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, Catherine the Great’s conquest of the Black Sea coast, the establishment of special access to the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and the Pereiaslav Agreement — all to legitimize Russia’s claims to the whole of Ukraine. He might have expounded on the various Dmitrys and False Dmitrys who glut Russian history books. Perhaps as a courtesy in acknowledgment of his audience’s rapidly diminishing patience, he elided that bit.
It was when Putin got to the period beginning with World War I that Carlson’s viewers were treated to the Russian president’s historical revisionism — an outlook obviously informed by Bolshevik orthodoxy.
Ukrainization, in Putin’s estimation, was a weapon of war. The concept of Ukrainian nationhood, which did not previously exist, was fabricated by the Austro-Hungarian general staff and exported to Tsarist Russia with the aim of weakening its wartime adversary. The Bolsheviks actually sought warm relations with a reborn Poland after Lenin took Russia out of the war in 1917. The young Soviet state went so far as to restore Polish sovereignty over the right bank of the Dnieper River, to which it had a claim following the Pereiaslav treaty. And this arrangement would have suited everyone if Poland hadn’t so recklessly antagonized Hitler in the 1930s.
In Putin’s telling, Poland “cooperated with Hitler.” Indeed, “Hitler offered Poland peace and a treaty of friendship” so long as Warsaw ceded the Danzig corridor, recoupling Germany with the noncontiguous territory of East Prussia. “Hitler asked them to give it amicably, and they refused,” Putin added. “Still, they collaborated with Hitler and engaged together in the partitioning of Czechoslovakia” — by which the Russian president presumably means Hitler’s 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland. “The Poles overplayed their hand and forced Hitler to start World War II with them,” Putin said. “Hitler had no remaining choice but to begin the realization of his plans with [the attack on] Poland.”
With the onset of war, the wicked Poles fell prey to the policies they’d pursued against the Czechs and Slovaks, Putin insisted. At this point, the Russian president embarked on a defense of Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, and his negotiations with his Nazi counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop, which culminated in a treaty of nonaggression. That treaty paved the way for a Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland and the subsummation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union. This, Putin noted, amounted only to the reclaiming of Russia’s “historical lands” — an arrangement that was “enshrined” in 1945. Thus, the logic of Moscow’s intention to press its campaign of territorial expansionism into Europe was laid bare.
Here, Putin digressed. “For some inexplicable reason,” he said, Vladimir Lenin in 1922 created the various autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics, of which Ukraine was one. In the process, he ceded to the Ukraine SSR the coast of the Black Sea, to which Kyiv had no historical connection. He also embarked on a campaign of “indigenization,” aimed at creating a native managerial class (a program later undone by Stalin through a mirror-image process of “Russification”). Thus, Ukraine’s origins are demonstrably “artificial.”
Tucker Carlson broke the fourth wall during his interview at this point when Putin began to wax lyrical about the ethnic-Hungarian population in Western Ukraine, whom he recalls retaining their vestigial Hungarian cultural traditions in his travels to the region in the 1980s. The host allowed himself a smirking sideward glance at the camera as Putin regaled him with the claim that those ethnic Hungarians do, indeed, long to reunify with their mother country under some quasi-Hapsburgian compact. That said, however, Putin assured his interviewer that he had never discussed the prospect of partitioning Ukraine with pro-Putin Hungarian president Viktor Orbán. Wink.
Fast-forward to 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This outcome was entirely inexplicable to Putin, but it should not have been. Of the many inducements to dissolution, the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact of which he is apparently so fond was one. Baltic representatives to the Soviet government sought and secured the opening of the archives, revealing that the union itself was an outgrowth of an agreement with Nazi Germany to enlarge the Soviet state, putting the lie to the USSR’s primary-origin myth.
The fall of the Soviet system paved the way for another development that Putin regards as one of history’s great crimes — the enlargement of NATO to include the sovereign states of the former Warsaw Pact and USSR that wanted to ascend to membership. “You tricked us,” he insisted, citing an alleged promise by American officials not to expand the alliance. But no such assurances were ever given — neither according to U.S. diplomat Robert Zoellick, who helped negotiate the terms of Moscow’s post–Cold War “soft landing,” nor according to former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.
The myth persists, as does Putin’s hostility toward NATO for engaging in an armed conflict against Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević’s government amid its campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslav territories during the 1990s. Again, Putin’s historical grievances extend well beyond Ukraine’s borders.
Putin’s hand was forced, he claims, following a 2008 NATO meeting in Bucharest. There, Putin alleges, Ukraine’s ascension to NATO was rendered all but imminent when the alliance established an “open door” policy. That is false.
In 2005, following the success of the pro-Western “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine and the ascension of Viktor Yushchenko — an official whom Putin claimed in this interview was illegitimately elected and whom his government poisoned with dioxin — to the presidency, Kyiv began an “intensified dialogue” with NATO around a Membership Action Plan (MAP). That MAP reached a dead end in Bucharest. There, delegates determined that the conditions for both Ukraine’s and Georgia’s accession would not be met anytime soon and agreed to NATO membership only in theory and only in the indefinite future. Moscow heard that signal loud and clear. It is no accident that Russia’s invasion and dismemberment of Georgia — an act of Russian adventurism that Carlson failed to raise — took place only a few months later.
Another of Putin’s frustrations is linked to the development of missile defense. Soviet archives reveal that, during the Cold War, Kremlin officials knew full well that U.S. missile-defense capabilities could not serve as a tool to facilitate a nuclear first strike — allowing the U.S. to attack Soviet nuclear forces while threatening to neutralize a retaliatory strike. But claiming otherwise was a potent rhetorical weapon, and Moscow wielded it to great effect — rallying those inclined to take the Soviets’ words at face value to the Kremlin’s cause. The same could be said for missile-defense technology today; although they have improved greatly, ballistic-missile defenses are still insufficient to neutralize a large incoming volley. Nevertheless, Moscow bleated in protest to such an extent that the Obama administration withdrew in 2009 a Bush-era pledge to provide Poland and the Czech Republic with radar and interceptor installations aimed at protecting their territories not from nuclear but from conventional attack. A lot of good that gesture did the Obama White House.
Much like the 2005 organic revolution that brought Yushchenko to power, the 2014 Maidan revolution that ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich was a “coup” in Putin’s estimation. That putsch was the result of elements within Ukraine dissatisfied with Yanukovich’s desire to balance its lucrative free-trade regime with Moscow against the European Union’s desire to wrest economic control of the country from the Kremlin. The provisional government “created a threat to Crimea” and “launched a war in Donbas,” to which Moscow was obliged to respond.
Nonsense. Yanukovich’s government sparked the protests that crushed his corrupt regime when it unilaterally suspended a free-trade agreement with the EU ratified by the Ukrainian parliament. Putin imagines a Ukraine that desires integration with Russia more than the West, but that Ukraine is not apparent in the polling. European integration is so integral to Ukraine’s identity it is codified in the country’s constitution. It was its people’s efforts to make that desire manifest that prompted Russia to invade Crimea by air in 2014, despite Moscow’s legal leasing rights to its military port at Sevastopol, which extended well into the 2040s. At no point was Ukraine’s ascension to NATO anything other than a distant, largely aspirational prospect. It was the threat posed by Ukrainian Westernization — culturally and economically — that compelled Putin to introduce an army of “little green men” into Donbas and inaugurate a war that never stopped.
Of course, Putin insists the conflict in Ukraine did stop with the signing of the Minsk Accords. It was the Zelensky government’s rejection of the terms agreed to at Minsk that ensured Russia had no choice but to mount a three-prong invasion of Ukraine designed to capture it whole. But the Minsk process was a farce from the start. As I wrote last year:
The original Minsk accord wasn’t worth the paper it was written on; it was repeatedly violated and was functionally defunct roughly a month after it was established. A successor accord — Minsk II — was no better; it, too, was never closely observed. If it had any value, that value was exclusive to Moscow, which used the agreement as a diplomatic fig leaf to establish itself as an ostensibly neutral observer of the conflict in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the fighting never stopped.
“It was they who started the war in 2014. Our goal is to stop this war. We did not star this war in 2022. This is an attempt to stop it,” Putin insisted. So, has Russia achieved its goals in Ukraine? No, Putin replied in a roundabout way. Not until the process of “denazification” was complete would Russia cease its assault on Ukrainian sovereignty. And as a boneheaded display by Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government demonstrated when Ottawa gave a standing ovation to a former Nazi SS officer because he, too, had fought the Russians, “denazification” will not succeed until the West abandons Ukraine. “If you really want to stop the fighting, you need to stop supplying weapons,” Putin maintained. “It will be over within a few weeks.” We can rest assured: These will be his last territorial demands in Europe.
From alleging that the collapse of Russia’s effort to quickly capture Kyiv at the start of the war was an act of benevolence designed to facilitate negotiations to his claim that the West agreed that Russia’s post–Cold War “borders should be along the borders of the former Union’s Republic,” it’s hard to know where Putin’s duplicity ends and his delusion begins. But Carlson insisted at the outset of his interview that the Russian president’s views are sincerely held, and the onetime KGB intelligence officer’s rhetoric was so shot through with Bolshevist agitprop that the former Fox host may be right.
Putin insisted that, after 1991, the West should have been more accommodating to Moscow because “we are now as bourgeois as you are.” He attributed the West’s confrontational posture toward the Kremlin to its defense industry’s “excessive production capacities,” a vulgar Marxian view of how Western national-security priorities are determined. “The president of Ukraine is a Jew by nationality,” Putin said of Ukraine’s president, appealing to categories once applied to Soviet internal passports.
Putin believes all this. This is how he was raised, in an empire that stretched from the Yalu to the Elbe. He clearly views his nation’s subsequently truncated borders as a problem to be fixed — and he has made plain for all to see how he intends to fix it.
No comments:
Post a Comment