General Chang : “To be or not to be?” That is the question which preoccupies our people, Captain Kirk. We need breathing room.
Captain James T. Kirk : Earth, Hitler, 1938.
General Chang : I beg your pardon.
Screenplay Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
An extremely perceptive look at what is motivating Putin by historian Norman Davies:
- Putin wants to recover what was lost 30 years ago, or at least significant parts of it. If this is true, one has to say that so far Putin has not been very successful. His Chechen war halted the fragmentation which had destroyed the Soviet Union and threatened to continue. But, having stopped the rot, his war against Georgia in 2008 ended with just two small gains – in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. His war against Ukraine has produced one clear gain in Crimea, one huge failure to capture Kyiv, and now the annexation of four districts which he doesn’t fully control. In sum, after two decades, he has amassed a total of 148,405 square kilometres of recovered territory – less than 3 per cent of that, which seceded in 1991. For a man credited with ‘rebuilding the Soviet empire’, his results are meagre.
- Russia needs people, especially Slavic people. Standing at 144 million, the Russian Federation’s population is only half of the Soviet Union’s last count of 287 million (1991), and has dropped far below the US’s 329 million or the European Union’s 447 million. Moreover, a declining birth rate among women, and high excess mortality, especially among men, both exacerbated by the pandemic, means that the population – and the ethnic Russian sector in particular – is declining. Cities like Moscow or St Petersburg fear the rising influx of non-Russian Asiatics. So, the prospect of incorporating white Slavic-speakers from Ukraine is widely welcomed. Since February, the Russian authorities have already deported more than a million Ukrainian citizens, many from Mariupol, who are unlikely to see their former homes again.
- Russia badly needs increased productivity. Historically Ukraine was more productive than Russia. ‘Muscovy’ without Ukraine was a vast, freezing chunk of tundra, looking with envy on the sunny land to the south with its fertile soil, abundant resources and western outlets. In the 20th century, Ukraine made a disproportionate contribution to the Soviet economy: Ukraine’s grain repeatedly saved Russia from famine. The hydroelectric dam at Dnieperpetrovsk was the jewel in Stalin’s Five Year Plans. The iron ore from Kryviy Rig represented 42 per cent of Soviet production, and Kryvorizstal’s furnaces were the country’s largest. Today, Russia’s economy is smaller than the UK’s, and, depending excessively on oil and gas, is highly unbalanced. Russians of Putin’s age remember the ‘good old days’, when they basked on Crimean beaches, as Ukraine’s bounty compensated for the Motherland’s poverty.
Go here to read the rest. Russia went from being one of the two global superpowers into a shadow of the old Soviet Union in the blink of an eye historically speaking and my generation witnessed it all over the past four decades. Now the strength of the old Soviet Union was always something of a Potemkin trick, aided by the sheer incompetence of the CIA spooks, who utterly missed the fact in the early eighties that the Soviet Union was nearing economic collapse. However, nostalgic myths are powerful motivators and that is what motivates Putin and the Russians who support him. That is why it is important that Putin’s Ukrainian adventure end not only in defeat but a humiliating defeat, so the recreation of the old Soviet Union does not become a recurrent theme in Russian politics and power struggles. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the West hoped that Russia had become a peaceful power. The great film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country mirrored this line of thought. It was a hopeful wish, and a foolish one.
The Western “dream” was foolish because Russia had no Nuremberg, which only the people of Russia could have imposed on its Communist elite. Medieval Russia was a collection of competing principalities with a common culture, but no central government, until the Mongol conquest. The princes of Moscow (originally the khan’s bagmen) led the war of independence, but also unification. The Mongol element in Russian history is overlooked.
Pretty much everyone missed the crappy state of the Russian economy in the 1980s. It can’t recall anyone who was not absolutely astounded at the USSR’s rapid dissolution.
A lot of Soviet dissidents were continually telling us how lousy the Soviet economy was. On the other hand I recall quite a few books in the seventies pointing to the Soviet economy as one to emulate in reference to economic planning and centralized regulation. The linked article by Galbraith in 1984 was typical:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1984/09/03/a-visit-to-russia
Most commentators viewed the Soviet Union as a permanent fixture on the world stage. A notable exception was Reagan who believed that the Soviet system was soon destined for the ash heap of history.
Vladimir Putin fancies himself as the restoration artist of the Imperial Russian Empire.
Russia grabbed land from Sweden to build St. Petersburg. Russia invaded Crimea and deported the Tatars who lived there. Belarus is basically Russified Lithuanians.
The Partitions, the Polish Soviet War, the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact, the Holodomor, Katyn, the murder of 140,000 + ethnic Poles in the USSR in the 1930s….this has been and IS Russia.
Putin’s disdaon for the decepit state of Western morals is in partdue to the KGB he worked for, as is Liberation Theology that has wrecked the Church in Latin America. Our Lady was not kidding about Russia spreading her errors.
Ukraine wants its territory back.
National Review did have an issue with the cover headline:
“The Coming Collapse of the USSR”.
Or something like that. Memory fails me sometimes. But there were people who saw it coming.
Belarus is basically Russified Lithuanians.
http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/belarusians.html
The money quote “”Slavic speakers of Eastern Europe are, in general, very similar in their genetic composition. Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians have almost identical proportions of Caucasus and Northern European components and have virtually no Asian influence.”
Russia’s total fertility rate reached its nadir around 1999 (at 1.16) then increased to 1.78 by 2016. At that point, it compared favorably to the European mean. It then fell to 1.51 over the next four years. Both the Ukraine and White Russia have had fertility rates inferior to that of Russia during that period of time. So, alas, has Poland, in spite of Poland’s fine economic performance. Britain, France, Ireland, and Albania are the only European countries which have approached replacement levels at any time in the last generation.
The Ukraine may have been ‘historically the most productive’ part of Russia, but that’s not been the case in the last generation. Per capita product in real terms in the Ukraine has been about half that of Russia and about 35% below that of White Russia as well. There is no post-communist country in Europe which has had more deficient economic performance since 1990.
Great Russians account for 81% of the population and the non-Russian population is distributed among scores of ethnic sets, with not minority having more than 3.5% of the population. The Muslim population is about 6.5% of the total, and, unlike in France, is made up of antique populations which have been settled in place for centuries.
As for maintaining the Ukraine as a buffer state, that could have been accomplished with less effort than has been invested in biting off parts of it.
Putin wants these territories (much as Xi wants to subjugate Hong Kong and Taiwan) because they’re predators.
Tom Byrne, your observation that post-Soviet Russia had no Nuremberg trials for its former masters is an excellent point. Those communist apparatchiks simply morphed into the oligarchs that have infested Russia’s political landscape since the fall of the USSR. Naturally, they will do all in their considerable power to block any accounting for their crimes.
A former dissident under the communists, Vladimir K. Bukovsky, returned to post-Soviet Russia and accessed the archives of the KGB. He wrote a jaw-dropping book, Judgement in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity that uses KGB records to document both Soviet crimes and Soviet penetration of western institutions— and the efforts of western institutions’ subsequent efforts to prevent any post-Soviet Nuremberg and the scandal it would inevitably bring to those western parties.
It’s …interesting… that Bukovsky’s book was a bestseller in Russia, and was translated into German, French and Polish by the mid-1990’s, but an English translation was repeatedly slow-walked and stonewalled by every major English-language publishing house for twenty five years— and has been studiously ignored by the same compromised western media and academia it accuses.
Clinton:
Of course by now the major criminals of the Soviet era have passed beyond human judgment, only their lieutenants (like Putin) remaining. Living on the West Coast I get the liberal take on everything, but the consensus among the press at the time was “thank Heavens there was no violence in the breakup of a nuclear power”.
When I was in Iceland in 2005 I met Russian Navy officers in port during the “Yeltsin thaw”. They were courteous, but I noticed that their shoulder boards were copies of the old Czarist insignia, complete with crossed cannons, the double eagle (crowned) and the inset arms of Moscow (St. George and the Dragon). It gave me a funny feeling, and now I know why.
For too long the Western elite have been convinced Communism was just a further-left version of Democratic Party policies. That it was thought to be not as bad as Nazism is evident in the movies, where Nazis were psychotic martinets, Commies (at the worst) chubby bumblers in ill-fitting suits.
How much has the Western media been complicit, and how far simply hoodwinked by people they misjudged, I wonder?
Tom, I agree that most of the Soviet apparatchiks that should have been tried for their crimes went to their Judgement years ago. But as Bukovsky documented in his book, not a few western political/media/academic persons and institutions were complicit in soviet crimes and the subsequent refusal to address those injustices.
It once was in the best interests of Russian communists to ignore those crimes. Now it’s mostly in the best interests of some western political parties, media, and academia to make sure no one looks to closely at what went on back then…
My brother says this is Biden’s proxy war.
I think Putin has his back to the wall and if he loses in Ukr, he is out with prejudice.
I am nowhere near as educated on the subject as you all.
I think as you say, the USSR was a successor of sorts to Czarist Russia in that it was aggressively expansive albeit with the alibi of spreading Marxist socialism. Putin seemed to want to resurrect that expansionism. Another inheritance was the evil character of the thugs that ruled the country both under the czars and commissars.
Not for nothing dd Our Lady of Fatima instruct us to pray for the conversion of Russia = evil on a national scale.
[…] What Does Russia Really Want? – Donald R. McClarey, J.D., at The American Catholic Your Services Are No Longer Required […]
Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago, a three volume book exposing the injustices and crimes against humanity wrought by the communists.Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in the gulag and gave an eyewitness account of the atrocities.
Penguin, thank you for listing the Holodomor. Stalin through an organized famine killed > 30 million Ukrainians. Why on earth would those people in the 21st century want to be under the Russian rule!. Yet Holodomor isn’t mentioned in the news or addressed by Biden when he sends huge chunks of our tax dollars to the Ukraine. Putin doesn’t care how many civilian Ukrainians are killed. Apparently also not concerned about the body count of young Russian soldiers. I wish I could find an old series, The Soviets. Aired on PBS. It told the story of how brutal the Communists were in killing off segments of the Republics’ populations. The Kremlin was asked for killing quotas by Commissars, a 100 thousand here, 300 k there. Sometimes they didn’t even specify what group they wanted to execute they just wanted to kill. It was noted that massacre
Attributed to the Nazis were actually done by the Communist Russians. Katy Forest, the execution of 10 to 20 thousand Polish officers is one.