By Gary Saul Morson
Thursday, March 16, 2023
When
Russia seized Crimea in 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry declared the action
passé. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by
invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext,” he explained in the
tone of a popular high schooler dismissing the clueless behavior of a social
wannabe. Among Russians, though, his reaction provoked mirth, much as Hillary
Clinton’s “reset” button did five years earlier. Did American leaders really
imagine they could stop tanks with trendy words? Are armies ever out of date?
And why go back to the “19th century,” as if the 20th had not been an era of
especially widespread warfare?
Americans
all too often presume that everyone else aspires to live and think as we do.
Others must share our values, if only in secret, or at least be eager to learn
them. This is a dangerous attitude to take with any nation or culture, but
perhaps especially so with Russians—and never more so than when the topic is
war. Russians simply do not think about war in the way Americans do.
As
Gregory Carleton observes in his superb 2017 study Russia: The Story of
War, war is an indispensable part of how Russians see the world and their
place in it. The extent to which World War II and all previous wars extending
back a thousand years define Russian national identity is truly astonishing.
Unless we grasp the Russian way of thinking, our policies are bound to be
ineffective, if not counterproductive. While some of our responses to the
attempted subjugation and submersion of Ukraine make sense, others may heighten
the determination of Russians to continue fighting regardless of cost or
sacrifice.
***
Reminders
of war are everywhere in Russia. Newlyweds ritually place flowers on the Tomb
of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow. I don’t know any American who can identify
the day May 9, the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender, but in Russia it is
the most important holiday of the year, consecrated by the Russian Orthodox
Church. The sun always shines in Moscow on May 9, a day of parades, because
Russian aircraft disperse the clouds. People carry photographs of relatives who
fought in the war and thereby join “the Eternal Regiment.” May 9 defines what
Carleton calls Russia’s “civic religion,” which, even more than Russian
Orthodox holidays, unites Russians of all social classes, believers and
atheists alike. They sense their kinship with the mystical body of the people,
past and present. By contrast, few Americans still commemorate December 7, save
for an annual newspaper article in the local paper and maybe an item on the
morning news.
Wars
figure in American history, of course, but they do not define what it is to be
an American. (A partial exception may once have been the Civil War in the
imagination of some Southerners.) The military in the United States may be
respected, but it is not sacred, and criticism of it does not constitute
blasphemy, as criticism of the Russian military often does. Of course, the
United States has never been occupied by a foreign power.
To
appreciate the Russian perspective, we should consider some basic historical
facts. Americans were profoundly shocked by our loss of more than 50,000
soldiers in the Vietnam War; in World War II, the toll was approximately
450,000. Now contrast that with historical memory in Russia. It is impossible
to know the Soviet death toll from 1941 to 1945, but it was surely greater than
20 million—about 1 in 7 of all people, adults and children. Only 3 percent of
Russian men born between 1923 and 1924 survived the war. Now go back a few more
decades. During World War I, the revolutions of 1917, and the civil war that
followed it, more than 10 million lost their lives, not just from violence but,
even more so, from hunger. In 1812, Napoleon’s Grand Army, the largest in
European history up to that point, reached Moscow, which burned to the ground.
In 1898, Nikolai Sukhotin, director of the General Staff Academy (the Russian
equivalent of West Point), calculated that Russia had spent 353 of the previous
525 years—two-thirds of its history as a nation—waging war.
Is it
any wonder, then, that war means something different to Russians? In their
conquest of the Russian lands in the 1230s, the Mongols wiped out whole cities
and then ruled for more than two centuries. Even after their defeat, the
Mongols’ successors in Crimea continued to raid Russia, burning Moscow twice,
in pursuit of slaves to sell in the Middle East. “Crimea” is not just the name
of a geographical space seized by Putin’s Russia in 2014. It is also a constant
reminder of horrific battles, such as the raid on the Sevastopol fortress by
the British and French during the Crimean War (1853–1856) and by the Nazis in
World War II.
The
Russian church has often elevated military leaders, not for dying for the
faith, but simply for their military prowess in defense of the Motherland. In
1988, the church canonized Dmitry Donskoy, the first Russian leader to defeat
the Mongols in battle. Alexander Nevsky, generally considered by Russians to be
the greatest countryman in their history, was proclaimed a saint for his
victories over the Swedes and Teutonic knights in the 13th century. He is now
the patron saint of the FSB (Putin’s successor to the KGB). Admiral Fyodor
Ushakov, who fought the Turks in the 18th century, has become the patron saint
(I am not making this up) of nuclear bombers.
President
Putin chose May 7 for his inauguration in 2000 so it would lead directly into
the May 9 holiday. An honor guard wore uniforms recalling those of the Napoleonic
Wars. Imagine the mockery if an American president’s inauguration featured
uniforms from the war of 1812. To us, 1812 was another world, and I know no one
who, when visiting Washington, recalls how the British burned it. For Russians,
on the other hand, history, especially military history, is not something in
the past. Kerry’s comment about Russians behaving as if it were the 19th
century presumes a linear view of history, in which later is better (or at
least more sophisticated). But for Russians, history is cyclical. As Carleton
astutely observes, “national identity . . . assumes that history . . . repeats
itself, extending back for centuries through a pattern of confrontation in
which the actors’ names may change but not the primary action.” So understood,
all wars become the same war, “a single paradigmatic one that pits Russians
against an implacable foe, where they are always the victims but never the
vanquished.” Hitler really did plan to exterminate or enslave the Russians, and
the Nazi thousand-day siege of Leningrad was designed to lead not to the
occupation of the city but its elimination from the face of the earth. Seeing
all wars as one war, many Russians read such intentions anachronistically into
all earlier conflicts and presume them in all present conflicts. Whoever is
Russia’s enemy means to destroy it utterly. No special evidence is required to
characterize Ukrainians resisting Russia as “fascists” or “Nazis,” and NATO
support of Ukraine can be meant only to destroy Russia. Only recently, many
Russians maintain, the massive influx of Western economic and cultural
influences after the fall of the USSR almost destroyed Russia “spiritually.”
In his
May 9, 2007, address, Putin warned that even though Nazi Germany no longer
existed, “such threats are not decreasing today. They merely transform
themselves by changing colors, and in these new threats . . . we see the same
disregard for human life and the same pretensions to global hegemony.” In the Commentary podcast Giving Tanks,
Frederick Kagan observed that even when Russian soldiers send home photos
contradicting official accounts, their parents say they are lying—a response
Kagan attributes to the effectiveness of Putin’s propaganda. True enough, but
what makes that propaganda so effective is a lifetime of seeing history as an
eternal existential conflict.
According
to the myth, Russia does not just defend itself, it saves civilization. The
reason the Mongols did not proceed to conquer Western Europe, the story goes,
is that they did not dare to leave “the indomitable Russians” in their rear.
For this reason, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko declared, the Eiffel Tower’s
roots grew out of soil watered with Russian blood. But in point of fact, the
Mongols defeated the “indomitable” Russians as easily as every other army they
encountered.
The
18th-century poet Gavriil Derzhavin enthused:
What an honor from generation to generation
For Russia, its glory indelible.
The universe saved by her,
From the new hordes.
And
there are always new hordes. The victory over Napoleon only reinforced this
self-image. During the 19th century, Carlton explains, the idea that “Russian
suffering was of another order, both in terms of scale and purpose,” took hold
among conservatives such as Dostoevsky as well as radicals such as Nicholas
Chernyshevsky. “It’s not as conquerors or pillagers that Russians
appear in history,” wrote Chernyshevsky, “but as saviors.” Needless
to say, Poles and Chechens did not see matters this way.
And how
have Europeans repaid Russia? Not just with ingratitude, the myth goes, but
with knives in the back. Even as Russia, suffering under Mongol rule, was
saving Europe, the Swedes and Teutonic knights took advantage of its apparent
weakness to attack, thereby inspiring the greatness of Alexander Nevsky. To a
Russian, the West’s irrational “Russophobia” seems eternal.
Sooner
or later, the countries that Russia saves turn on it, in the Russian mind. It
has recently become common in Moscow to quote the quip of Czar Alexander III
that “Russia has only two allies—its army and its navy.” Russia is most itself,
and most noble, when it is utterly isolated, alone against the world. At such
moments, Russian patriotism reaches its apogee.
***
Of
course, not everyone believes this. Although Tolstoy’s novel War and
Peace is routinely forced by rulers into the mythic mode, the book
repeatedly debunks mythic thinking, simplistic historical narratives, the
celebration of war, the division of people into us and them, and the cult of
heroism. Its central character, Prince Andrei, begins believing in “glory” and
eventually comes to realize the emptiness of this ideal. General Kutuzov, the
book’s wisest character (and a real-life figure out of the Napoleonic Wars),
despises not only simplistic narratives and facile pretensions to knowledge but
also “patriotic feeling”—not, as Tolstoy explains, because of any knowledge of
his own, “but because of something else. He despised them because of his age
and experience of life.” Other Russian writers, from Vsevolod Garshin in the
19th century to Vasily Grossman in the 20th, have also questioned the myth.
During
the period of glasnost in the 1980s and shortly after, some novelists and
memoirists painted a wholly different picture of the war against the Germans.
To begin with, they acknowledged that for the first third of the war, the USSR
was Nazi Germany’s ally after having signed a treaty that divided up Eastern
Europe. Supplying the Third Reich with raw materials for two years, Russia
joined the allies only after it was attacked. Having done away with 90 percent
of its generals and admirals during Stalin’s systematic elimination of all
potential opposition in the Great Purges of the 1930s, the USSR was in no
position to respond adequately to invasion—all the more so because Stalin, who
trusted Hitler, had left the country virtually defenseless.
The
Soviet government had already grown used to squandering millions of lives in
class warfare, industrialization, the collectivization of agriculture, slave
labor, and the frozen camps of Siberia, and it could hardly have been more
profligate with human life during the war. There is no doubt that much loss of
life was self-inflicted. Even in besieged and starving Leningrad, the secret
police continued their relentless arrests. Soldiers were treated as an
infinite, essentially inanimate resource, so mine fields were cleared by having
soldiers walk over them. To prevent men from retreating, “blocking detachments”
of machine gunners were placed behind them. Defective equipment, lack of
shelter, inadequate clothing, poor sanitary conditions, and worse medical
treatment defined the soldier’s experience. “What united recruits,” Carleton
summarizes the memoirists, “besides diarrhea and lice, was constant,
irrepressible hunger.” Some soldiers received adequate food only in 1945 from
captured German food stocks. Officers stole soldiers’ food and treated their
underlings with shocking brutality. Soldiers recalled fearing their own
superiors more than the Germans.
After
the war, the Russian army was celebrated, but injured veterans were utterly
neglected. Russian soldiers who had been freed from Nazi prison camps were
immediately dispatched to Soviet ones, since anyone who had seen the West was
regarded as dangerous. Well aware of what awaited them, countless Russian
soldiers did anything to avoid going home. I remember my Russian history
teacher observing that more people after the war claimed to be Serbs than the
entire male population of Serbia. Eventually, the Allies, naively fulfilling their
obligation to return citizens to their homeland, forced Russians into transport
vehicles at bayonet point.
The Red
Army had supposedly liberated Eastern Europe, but their treatment of it could
hardly be more shocking. Not just Germany was subjected to mass pillage and
rape; so were allies, such as Poland. As Anne Applebaum points out in Iron
Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956, when the
Yugoslavian Communist intellectual Milovan Djilas objected to Red Army
behavior, Stalin asked how, as a writer, Djilas could not “understand it if a
soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and
death has fun with a woman or takes a trifle.” In January 1946, Hungary’s
social-welfare minister responded to the consequences of mass rape with an
evasive decree: “As an effect of the front and the chaos following it, there
were a lot of children born whose families did not want to take care of them. I
ask thereby the bureau of orphanage to qualify all babies as abandoned whose
date of births is from 9 to 18 months after the liberation.”
***
The
historical record demonstrating this horrific behavior toward “liberated”
people is routinely denied, of course, but the myth has no trouble in making
use of the phenomenal death rate of Soviet soldiers. Here we come across what,
to Americans, must be the strangest aspect of Russian thinking about war: the
cult of death. In our war movies, the true heroes (or most of them) survive. By
contrast, countless Russian war movies and novels feature as much death as
possible. The story is not complete if anyone beside the one reporting the
events survives. The more death, the greater the heroism.
Stories
of mass death redeem Russia’s defeats, whether in World War I, Chechnya, or
Afghanistan. The standard plot is that, against all odds, Russian defenders
continue fighting even when defeat is certain and there is no hope of escape.
They die gloriously, rather than surrender. Consider the mythified story of the
Brest Fortress. Located near the border between the Soviet Union and Poland,
the fortress was rapidly surrounded by the Germans in 1941, but Soviet forces,
remarkably, continued resisting for two weeks. Those too injured to fight
supposedly killed themselves so as not to waste food. A last stand took place
in underground tunnels amid fetid corpses. According to the legend inspiring
Boris Vasiliev’s 1974 novel His Name Was Not Listed, one hero
survived underground and continued to harass the Germans for months until his
eyesight failed. This novel repeats the myth’s formulae: “Die, but don’t give
up,” “defeat death with death,” and “you can’t conquer a real man even if you
kill him.” The fact that today the fortress is within the borders of the nation
of Belarus only feeds the belief that Russian lands extend beyond the present
Russian federation. Geography is not just physical but spiritual, so any place
where Russians fought a heroic battle—in Belarus, in Crimea, in Kiev—belongs to
Russia.
The
story of the Brest Fortress illustrates the distinctively Russian virtue
of stoikost. Derived from the verb “to stand,” it means the ability
to absorb endless suffering and casualties without giving in. General Mikhail
Dragomirov, head of the Russian General Staff Academy at the turn of the 20th
century, took this doctrine so seriously that he scorned using the latest
weaponry, such as the machine gun, lest it compromise Russian stoikost.
He even opposed digging trenches or keeping one’s head down. “The Russian dies
simply,” Dragomirov explained, “as if performing a rite.” The result was
thorough defeat in the Russo–Japanese war in 1905—and then, of course, a new
mythic story of how the ship Verlag continued to fight the
Japanese navy on its own.
***
Russia
as the savior, the suffering hero, the eternally betrayed victim; Russia as
always isolated and fighting for its very existence: This way of thinking may
inspire Russians, but it understandably frightens their neighbors. From their
point of view, the most impressive feature of Russia’s history is its continual
expansion. Beginning with the conquest of Kazan in 1552, Russia acquired land
about the size of Belgium every year for 400 years. In 1864, Foreign Minister
Alexander Gorchakov explained that, to secure its borders, Russia had to
conquer the territory just beyond them, which in turn created a new border
dictating yet another expansion, and so on. In this way, Russia advanced to the
Pacific Ocean in the 17th century; in the 18th, it reached the Black Sea while
adding western Ukraine and most of Poland; and during the 19th, it occupied the
Caucasus, annexed Finland, and completed the conquest of central Asia. With the
adoption of Communism in the 20th century, Soviet Russia created puppet states
in Eastern Europe while spreading its ideology to China, North Korea,
Indochina, Ethiopia, and Cuba. So brutal has Russian and Communist rule been
that one understands why Poles sometimes present themselves as Europe’s bulwark
against barbarism, so that every time Poland loses territory to Russia, the
civilized world grows that much smaller.
And how
could Russia’s neighbors not be afraid? If Russians are willing to burn their
own cities to the ground, as Ivan the Terrible did in the 16th century, or
deliberately starve millions of their own peasants to collectivize agriculture,
as Ivan’s admirer Stalin did, what would they do to others? And if the Russians
are willing to treat Ukrainians, whom they claim to regard as the same people
as themselves, as they do today, what would they do to Moldovans, Estonians, or
Poles?
No less
disturbing has been the authoritarianism fostered by Russian mythmaking. It is
routine for Russians to observe that whenever power has been decentralized,
Russia has been subject to invasion. From this perspective, the “invasion” of
Western ideologies and capital in the 1990s repeated the pattern set in the
13th and early-17th centuries. Only if state power is absolute and
unquestioned, such thinking goes, can Russia survive. Democracy and
decentralized power may be fine for Westerners, but for Russia they spell
annihilation.
***
Once one
grasps how Russians think, one understands why Putin declares that Russia is
now fighting not the Ukrainian people but fascists, and why he pictures Russia
as the underdog in a struggle with NATO. Also clear is his confidence that
Russia can outlast its foes and that Western powers will tire of paying for a
war before Russians tire of dying in it.
In this
light, one might reconsider American responses to Putin’s invasion. Military
aid to Ukraine may be necessary to prevent subsequent invasions of Moldova or
other neighboring countries and then to forestall the conquest of those
neighbors’ neighbors. Success, as Kagan insisted on the January 25 Commentary podcast, requires real
commitment on our part, not just a burst of sympathy that lasts until the next
morally inspiring cause presents itself. The president must explain clearly and
forcefully what is at stake and why. On the other hand, some Western sanctions
seem counterproductive. It is one thing to prevent the Russian army from
accessing needed parts and technology, but it is folly to imagine that Russians
will respond to a lower standard of living (the purpose of imposing sanctions)
as we would; quite the contrary.
By the
same token, widespread attempts to “cancel” all of Russian culture are
particularly ill-advised, as well as just plain silly. In 2022, a concert
featuring the compositions of Stravinsky was canceled in Belgium, while the
Cardiff Philharmonic in Wales scratched a Tchaikovsky program. The Haarlem
Philharmonic in the Netherlands decided it “would be inappropriate to celebrate
Russian music” and killed off a festival featuring both Tchaikovsky and
Stravinsky. Closer to home, the Vancouver Recital Society cancelled pianist
Alexander Malofeev, the winner of an International Tchaikovsky Prize for Young
Musicians. Columbia University Press curtailed a series of translations of
Russian literary classics. A colleague objected to my own university’s
fledgling center to study the history of Russian philosophy; one even hears
calls to “decolonize” the curriculum by ending the teaching of War and
Peace.
Even
when the Soviet Union posed a much greater threat to the United States, no one
tried to cancel Tchaikovsky concerts or lectures on Dostoevsky. To the
contrary, that was when the study of Russian culture first took off in American
universities and Russian language began to be taught in high schools. In
contrast to today, Americans reasoned that it made sense to know more, not
less, about one’s rival.
Such
actions not only make our students more ignorant, they validate Russian
accusations that the West is fighting not to preserve Ukrainian borders but to
destroy Russian culture. Why else would one hold Stravinsky or Tolstoy (who
eventually rejected all war) responsible? By the same token, making Russians,
including those who have fled Putin’s Russia, feel like pariahs can only
strengthen their will to resist. And does it make sense to prevent Russians who
disagree with Putin from accessing assets they need to escape the country?
Far from
fighting a war against Russian culture, we should be encouraging Russians to
define it differently. In the Russian imagination, only one thing competes in
importance with war, and that is Russian literature. As I explain in my
forthcoming book,1 no country in the world has valued
literature more than Russia, and Russians consider this fact essential to who
they are. In a review of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky himself suggested that
at last the existence of the Russian people had been justified by its
publication. It is hard to imagine a Frenchman or an American thinking his
existence required justification, but, if he did, surely he would not find it
in a work of literature!
Westerners
take for granted that literature exists to reflect life, but Russians often
speak as if life exists to be made into literature. Literature is Russian
scripture. The very phrase “Russian literature” carries a sacred aura and
resonates entirely differently from the way “American literature” sounds to
Americans. In their attitude to their canon, Russians can perhaps best be
compared to the ancient Hebrews when the scriptural canon was open and books
could still be added to it.
Far from
canceling Russian literature and other great Russian cultural achievements, we
should be encouraging Russians to take pride in them instead of in war. Not
Nevsky but Chekhov, not tanks but Turgenev, not the patron saint of nuclear
bombers but the author of Anna Karenina. Only in that way can
Putin’s Russia become Pushkin’s Russia.
1 Wonder Confronts Certainty:
Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard UP,
2023).
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