It’s impossible to understand the destruction and death that Vladimir Putin is unleashing in Ukraine without understanding his most basic conviction: that the breakup of the Soviet empire was a catastrophe from which Russia has yet to recover.
Some experts, including John Mearsheimer, have blamed NATO expansion for the invasion of Ukraine, arguing that it has provoked Vladimir Putin to defend his sphere of influence.
Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University, and a research scholar at the Hoover Institution, respectfully disagrees. Putin’s aggression is “not some kind of deviation from the historical pattern,” he tells David Remnick.
Russia in the nineteenth century looked much as it does today, he says. “It had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West.” Kotkin describes how and why the Putin regime has evolved toward despotism, and he speculates that the strategic blunders in invading Ukraine likely resulted from
- 1] the biases of authoritarian rulers like Putin, and
- 2] the lack of good information available to them.
Kotkin is the author of an authoritative biography of Joseph Stalin, two volumes of which have been published; a third is in the making.
====
A very interesting take from one of world’s best experts on Stalin and Stalinism. Blaming West for just everything wrong on this poor planet is itself a sort of Eurocentrism in disguise. Such an approach effectively denies the agency of the local actors, while it is exactly the actions of the locals that could be crucial.
For one thing, a faction of Ukrainian elite wanted to join NATO a way more than the NATO wanted to accept them.
For another thing, whatever NATO did or didn’t, Putin’s actions follow a clear pattern largely recognisable to any who seriously worked with Russian history.
Russia’s imperial states are typically deficient when it comes to capital and technology, so coercion is being used instead. Russia’s imperial benchmark is continental expansion, aiming at control of vital resources - and Ukraine is where you find anything, from wheat to neon gas.
Much of the history of Russian statehood is the history of conquest, and much of the slaughter took place in Ukraine- West Ukraine, for example, was annexed by Stalin in 1939, while the last armed partisans there were “mobbed up” in 1959. The only difference is that the bloodbaths in Galicia and Volyn that time weren’t televised live…It is one thing that Russia’s progressive intellectuals have to think through in the light of the state crime being committed now in front of our eyes - can we one day build up a Russian identity which would NOT be imperialist and hegemonic???
No comments:
Post a Comment