I want to draw up a general profile of Russia. In the coming days, I may go deeper, producing more detailed profiles, analyses and forecasts, and perhaps even news stories. For the latter, I may need to review my “contracts.”
As you know, Russia is a country created not by diplomats but by bayonets. It wants to solve its problems not with pens, but with bayonets. More often than not, it does not even entertain the possibility that there might be another way. Perhaps you have noticed that there is a trick here. If, like me, you have not lived in Russia for many years and come to know its society both professionally and personally, it is not particularly easy to spot. I am not praising myself here. Believe me, becoming this much of an expert on Russia eventually leaves you wondering whether it was worth it at all, and that question inevitably ends with the answer no overwhelmingly defeating the answer yes.
Let us return to the trick. The emphasis is on the problems. Not the bayonets.
Look at the night immediately before the invasion of Ukraine. Those catastrophic hours when we listened to Putin deliver his extraordinarily long history lecture. What he was actually doing was defining a problem for us. He then explained, rather briefly, how it was to be solved. You can be certain that Putin did not invent this. In Henry Kissinger’s exquisite formulation, “From Peter the Great to Putin, circumstances have changed, but the concept of order has remained remarkably constant.”
Order, problems and bayonets.
An old friend I mentioned in the first paragraph once suggested that we follow Peter the Great’s route. We had that conversation in London. Look at the irony of fate: he is now in Amsterdam, one of the cities Peter visited for inspiration when he set out to build his own city, while I am in Moscow.
Unlike the two harmless fools who think that drinking beer gives them the freedom to come up with absurd theories about historical figures, Putin actually followed Peter’s path. In the 1990s, he brought Russia, then the sick man of Europe, back to health — helped, admittedly, by an extraordinary stroke of geopolitical luck. What subsequently dragged it back down was the West’s reluctance to leave its comfort zone, combined with the successive wrong decisions of a Russian regime that imagined it was pushing its own shadow. And, of course, we should not forget that Russia has been brought to the brink of a demographic catastrophe.
Russia, which at the end of the 1990s was still a country with good schools, well-educated generations and a desire to see a future ahead of itself, has today acquired a mindset resembling that of Germany after the Great War. As for those who describe it as a rogue state, I cannot really object. It often behaves like one.
I cannot tell you anything about Russian society that you have not heard before. Its addiction to pain and tragedy is the greatest pillar of the Russian state system. It has been so from the tsars to the Politburo and to the present regime.
The reach of the dissenting opinion leaders in Moscow and St. Petersburg does not extend even beyond the neighborhoods in which they live. Russian students cannot imagine a future for themselves either in their own country or in the West. Families cannot be built. The population cannot replenish itself. Whatever it is they are planning to build in Siberia, there is, quite reasonably, a great deal of doubt about whether it can succeed.
Just as the Battle of Tsushima helped prepare the way for the end of the Tsarist regime, and Afghanistan did the same for the Soviet Union, Ukraine may do the same to the current regime.
There is an identity crisis, an extraordinary degree of income inequality, a society moving rapidly toward demographic and sociological disaster, and on top of all this, the war in Ukraine.
As for how far the Russian people’s extraordinary resilience to pain and tragedy can endure, I do not have an answer to that question yet.
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