Commentary on Jade McGlynn’s book Putin’s War, Part 5 of 5: Was NATO membership for Ukraine really the motivation for their invasion?

In her own view of the motivations behind Russia’s foreign policy toward Ukraine, McGlynn seems to split the difference between the realist notion that Russian leaders were making some kind of rational calculation about how eastward expansion of NATO to Ukraine endangered their security, and the preferred Western hawkish view that Russia is just inherently expansive and that’s just how they are.

Part of how she does this is by making the argument that:

[I]f NATO membership was the immediate threat, then Russia behaved entirely counterintuitively, since its occupation of Crimea and Donbas in 2014 had put an effective stop to any formal entry of Ukraine into NATO because it would have required the politically unacceptable act of Kyiv giving up its claim to these territories.

That’s technically true. Under the current practice of NATO, signing Ukraine on as a full NATO member would require the NATO partners to defend Ukrainian territory including Russian-held territory in the Donbas and Crimea. Accepting Ukraine as a NATO member would in that case be equivalent to the US declaring war on Russia. So if those rules of the game held, Russian occupation of any part of Ukrainian territory would have eliminated the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO.

But there are other considerations. Large-scale US military aid to Ukraine began during the Trump Administration with Democratic support. And the US and other NATO countries were actively cooperating with Ukraine on military preparations. So it was not unreasonable for Russian strategists to view that as Ukraine becoming a de facto member of NATO. After all, NATO famously announced in 2008 that both Ukraine and Georgia would become NATO members at some unspecified time in the future.

And NATO could also change the rules by admitting Ukraine with the stipulation that it would not require the other allies to militarily contest Russian-occupied areas but rather draw the defensive line at the Ukrainian-hold areas at the moment of entry. The status of West Germany and East Germany prior to unification in 1990 can’t really be easily compared to that hypothetical Ukraine scenario because the final status of those two countries still depended on the approval of the wartime Allies. But West Germany did become a NATO member. But that decision was controversial, not least because defining West Germany as the boundaries that NATO would defend implied a permanent status for those borders, though the West German government always considered national unification as a goal.

McGlynn suggests that Russia’s real concern is “not about NATO so much as what NATO represents, even civilisationally, [which] explains why Russia meekly accepted Sweden and Finland joining NATO.” And it’s true that Russia hasn't shown such alarm about Finland’s NATO membership or the earlier addition of the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to NATO.

But she’s not so much splitting the difference as emphasizing that it’s not NATO expansion as such that disturbs the Russian leadership as it is the US and NATO challenging its influence in particular countries it considers high priority and the broader inclination to go to war in various places. She recalls one of the many wars that American voters tend to forget, but Russian strategists definitely remember, the Kosovo War of 1998-99 in which NATO went to war against Yugoslavia/Serbia to support the secessionist aims of Kosovo province:

The West's support for the Kosovo Liberation Army, whom they had previously classified as terrorists, at least until they were fighting against Yugoslav forces, led even democratically minded Russian opposition MPs to vehemently criticize Western actions in the Balkans. This sentiment grew stronger after NATO'·s bombing campaign against rump Yugoslavia in 1999, which forced Slobodan Milosevic to negotiate. The resulting Kosovar autonomy led many Serb civilians to flee the province and facilitated the ethnic cleansing of Serbs. Although Russia contributed to an international effort to send peacekeepers to Kosovo, they openly supported the Yugoslav forces there and even stormed Pristina airport, preventing NATO planes from landing. Tactically pointless, this act was rich in symbolism, conveying both Russia's disagreement with NATO policy and a renewed desire to assert its interests. (p. 120)

And she describes how Russian leaders and pro-government media have used this as a lesson for the public on the claimed perfidy of the West over Ukraine:

Before 2022, there were four main ways in which Russian media and politicians told the story of the Yugoslav wars: Yugoslavia as the first colour revolution; Western exploitation of Russian weakness; the need for multipolarity to prevent Western dominance; and Western disregard for international law. During the Revolution of Dignity in 2013/2014, Russian elites invoked the wars in Yugoslavia as a precursor to State Department-backed colour revolutions. By contrast, in response to Western criticism of the annexation of Crimea, Russian politicians and media would bring up Western disregard for international law when they bombed Belgrade and/or recognised Kosovo. 7 As ever, Russia's leaders shifted their perspectives on the past to meet the political demands of the present. (p. 121)

She notes that in the lead-up to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian commentary reflected these themes from the Kosovo War but also emphasized two further aspects: attacks on civilians and what she calls the “Russia becomes the West” theme.

In Russia's 2022 retellings of the Yugoslav wars, it was demonstrating (to itself most of all) not only a return to great power status, which it had assured after its intervention in Syria, but an explicit undoing of the post-Cold War security architecture, crossing the threshold into a different world order, rather than simply straining or revising the current rules. This mirroring could be seen in the justification for Russian ground forces' invasion of Donbas to 'avert the risk of genocide'. The message [to the West] was: Russia is back. You defined the order before but now we do. You thought you were exceptional but you weren't – we are. [my emphasis] (p. 123)

In this connections, she mentions a quirky theme that appears in Russian political discussion, the particular role of the “Anglo-Saxons,” i.e., Britain. She quotes one of her interlocutors, Fedor Lukyanov, editor of the academic journal Russia in Global Affairs and “a foreign-policy analyst close to the Kremlin,” who quipped, “when Russia goes, so will the last country who still thinks Britain is a major power.” She also notes, “There is a common view among [Russian] nationalists and Eurasianists that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky is a British agent.”

McGlynn’s book provides a very helpful look at the various ways in which the Russian people themselves are processing the Ukraine War and the various kinds of historical and ideological narratives that are characteristic of their information environment. 

[Lightly edited for clarity]

Commentary on Jade McGlynn’s book Putin’s War (2023), Part 4 of 5: Lasting effects of Russia’s difficult 1990s

One of the most informative parts of McGlynn’s analysis of Russian attitudes toward the Ukraine War is that she stresses the ways in which most Russians experienced the aftermath of the end of the Soviet Union as a very difficult, disturbing experience in their own lives and as a humiliation for the country.

One of the most informative parts of McGlynn’s analysis of Russian attitudes toward the Ukraine War is that she stresses the ways in which most Russians experienced the aftermath of the end of the Soviet Union as a very difficult, disturbing experience in their own lives and as a humiliation for the country.

Putin's 2005 remark that the collapse of the USSR was a catastrophe struck a chord with the many people in Russia who lost out from 1991, people who had wanted things to be better but lost spirit when they quickly turned out like always, as Chernomyrdin dourly quipped. lt is perhaps unsurprising that while polls demonstrated majority support for the dismantlement of the USSR before 1991, following the difficult transition from Communism, by 1995 people were already expressing a marked nostalgia for the Soviet era. Putin has drawn strength from this disappointment, successfully positioning himself as the antidote to the 'wild 1990s'. A good deal of Putin's popularity derives from the fact that under his rule, there had been marked improvements in Russia's international status, ability to pay its debts, and GDP. There is a genuine popular gratitude for these advances, which does not appear to lessen with time, perhaps because the popular view of the 1990s also appears to get worse over time. (p. 106) [my emphasis]

The prevailing sentiment in Europe and especially the US after the end of the USSR has an intensely celebratory one. And a downright triumphalist one for American policy makers. As Nelson Lichtenstein wrote in 2004:

A triumphalism of the free market is today the single greatest legacy of the end of the Cold War. The idea that capitalist markets are essential to, even define, the democratic idea has always been present in the West, but the idea achieved a majoritarian weight in the 1970s, and a near hegemonic power after the fall of the Berlin Wall. "Let us celebrate an American triumph," thundered Mort Zuckerman in US News late in the 1990s, "a triumph" based on the rock of an unfettered capitalism: "privatize, deregulate, and do not interfere with the market." [my emphasis] (1)

The general Russian public did not experience it that way!

Economist Joe Stiglitz wrote in 2003:

The move from communism to capitalism in Russia after 1991 was supposed to bring unprecedented prosperity. It did not. By the time of the rouble crisis of August 1998, output had fallen by almost half and poverty had increased from 2% of the population to over 40%.

Russia's performance since then has been impressive, yet its gross domestic product remains almost 30% below what it was in 1990. At 4% growth per annum, it will take Russia's economy another decade to get back to where it was when communism collapsed. (2)

But, hey, the Russian oligarchs were doing fine. So why didn’t the rest of you Russian losers just suck it up and work harder, amirite?

But that grumpy old Keynesian Stiglitz had a different take:

IMF-style neo-liberals are now trotting out an interpretation that amounts to a belated declaration of victory. The pre-1998 period of economic decline, on their view, reflected a stalled transition process, whereas the rouble crisis finally jolted the authorities into action, with recovery following implementation of far-reaching reforms.

But the real explanation lies elsewhere - and is much simpler. Until 1998, the rouble was overvalued, making it impossible for domestic producers to compete with imports. The IMF did not want Russia to devalue, and it provided billions of dollars to prop up the exchange rate. The IMF and the US Treasury worried that any change would restart inflation, because there was little or no excess productive capacity.

This was a remarkable confession: these officials evidently believed that their policies had wrecked nearly half of Russia's economic capacity in the space of just a few years.

Of course, for the devotees of neoliberalism, their doctrine can’t fail- It can only be failed for the actual human beings implementing it. But even in an essay supposedly refuting the “myth” that “Liberal market reform in the 1990s was bad for Russia,” Philip Hanson writes:

The greatest attention, however, has been paid to the shortcomings of privatization. Here the political situation forced the reformers into damaging compromises. For the bulk of large-scale enterprises, the plan had been to follow the Czechoslovak model of mass privatization where citizens were issued with vouchers that could be used to purchase shares in any enterprise. Meanwhile, Russian managers were grabbing control of enterprises and wanted the official privatization process to allow this to continue. Anatoli Chubais, who was in charge of mass privatization, was forced to allow an option whereby the workforce of an enterprise could vote to use its vouchers on its own workplace. This was popular. It mostly resulted in the Soviet-era bosses controlling the factories.

As a transitional arrangement, this might not have been too bad. What really destroyed the reputation of the Russian privatization process was the loans-for-shares auctions of a handful of giant oil and metals companies – the big earners of the economy (the gas ministry, spanning the whole gas industry, had turned itself into Gazprom). In rigged auctions with predetermined results, the likes of Yukos Oil and Norilsk Nickel were sold to the new banks for sums that seemed in retrospect tiny. [my emphasis] (3)

This background is important for understanding Russian popular attitudes that regard Western intentions toward their country with skepticism. And it is also a big part of how the leadership views the goals of the West toward their country. It should also be obvious that not every citizen or every member of the government will draw the same conclusions from that past experience. But the experience does form a real historical background that is all too rarely mentioned in Western mainstream discussions of Russia and its foreign policies.

The economist Jeffrey Sachs was part of the US team of advisers on the transition from the socialist to the “market,” i.e., liberal-capitalist economic organization in the early 1990s. He resigned that role at the end of 1993, believing that the Western policies including those of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would have disastrous effects on the Russian economy.

In his 2005 book The End of Poverty, Sachs argues that the George H.W. Bush Administration saw Russia after the transition from the USSR is a very different way than it saw eastern European countries like Poland. He notes that two of the grimmest figures in the history of American foreign policy, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, were highly influential in Old Man Bush’s Administration, as they would later be even more so in Shrub Bush’s government. Sachs note that the were especially emphatic in their emphasis that the US goal should be “to ensure long-term U.S. military dominance over all rivals, including Russia.”

They viewed former Warsaw Pact countries including Poland as allies in containing Russia and as potential future members of NATO, and so were more inclined to actively assist those countries in their economic transition. But in the case of Russia, Sachs faulted the Bush 1 Administration for neglecting the urgent need for a ruble currency stabilization fund, debt relief for Russia, and what he envisioned as a “new aid program for transformation, focusing on the most vulnerable social sectors of the Russian economy.”

But those didn’t happen on the scale he thought was necessary. The stabilization fund was essentially stillborn by mid-1992. The ruble became highly unstable. Initially, the former Soviet ruble continued to be used by the post-Soviet republics including Russia, a situation that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was not in a rush to change. The collapse of a currency, which happened in Russia, is a traumatic and disruptive event. In some areas, local economies operated on a barter basis for a time.

The refusal of the G7 governments to allow Russia to suspend debt payments has also extremely consequential. Sachs writes:

Worse still, the G7 negotiated a special ''.joint and several obligation" clause with the successor states, in which each pledged to make good, if necessary, on the overall Soviet-era debt. That led to a thicket of political and financial problems that took years to unravel. The G7 insistence on debt repayments was reckless and shortsighted. Lt simply guaranteed that Russia would be utterly drained of foreign exchange reserves by early 1992, which is exactly what happened by February 1992. (p. 130)

Any notion of the West promoting a Russian economy still based on large-scale state ownership of enterprises was basically not on the menu of options that Bush Administration would have considered. But the goal of establishing a liberal democracy, with or without wide-ranging state ownership of enterprises, was never the first priority in practice.

As bad as those initial problems proved to be, Sachs considered the nature of the massive privatization wave:

The worst occurred in 1995 and 1996... During those two years, Russian privatization became a shameless and criminal activity. Essentially, a corrupt group of so-called businessmen, who later became known collectively as Russia's new oligarchs, were able to get their hands on tens of billions of dollars of natural resource wealth, mainly the oil and gas holdings of the Russian state. The best estimates are that about $100 billion dollars of oil, gas, and other valuable commodities were transferred to private hands in return for perhaps no more than $1 billion of privatization receipts taken in by the treasury. Billionaires were created overnight, the proud (and newly rich) owners of Russia's oil and gas industry.

When the phony privatization process was announced, under a disreputable shares-for-loans scheme in which insiders would get access to company shares in return for making loans to the government, I tried to warn the U.S. government, the IMF, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and other G7 governments. I told them that I knew the players in this affair, and that the process was utterly disreputable. In the end, valuable state-owned resources would be plundered, and the Russian treasury would suffer greatly. Rather than using oil and gas income to support pensioners, for example, the energy-sector proceeds would now go straight into private pockets.

The West let this happen without a murmur. Many in the Clinton administration reportedly thought that shares for loans represented a clever deal: Yeltsin would give away the state's assets, and the cronies - the new oligarchs - would help finance Yeltsin 's 1996 reelection. What a disastrously inefficient way to finance a reelection campaign! Probably tens of billions of dollars in value went out of the government's coffers, and a few hundred million dollars came back for the Yeltsin campaign.

From the view of the imagined Free Market of the neoliberals, this was an ideal outcome. The oligarchs made out like bandits. And on the American side, the disaster was bipartisan! And another win for TINA (There Is No Alternative)!

Nome of this implies that we should let Putin and the Russian oligarchs off the hook for their bad acts over the decades.

But it does mean that there are solid, reality-based reasons for Russians to remember the 1990s as a bad time in which the West was not motivated exclusively by goodwill toward them and their country. And that it is not entirely delusional for them to think that Putin’s own performance and his intentions toward them may be preferable to what the US leadership and that of other Western nations may want for them.

Next: Was NATO membership for Ukraine really the motivation for their invasion?

Notes:

(1) Lichtenstein, Nelson (2004): Market Triumphalism and the Wishful Liberals. In: Schricker, Ellen, ed., 103-125. Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism. London: New Press.

(2) Stiglitz, Josepb (2003): The ruin of Russia. Guardian 2024-21-08). <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/09/russia.artsandhumanities> (Accessed: 2024-21-08).

(3) Hanson, Philip (2021): Myth 13: ‘Liberal market reform in the 1990s was bad for Russia’. In: Myths and misconceptions in the debate on Russia, 83-84. Chatham House Report May 2021. <https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/05/myths-and-misconceptions-debate-russia/myth-13-liberal-market-reform-1990s-was-bad-russia> (Accessed; 2024-21-08).

(4) Sachs, Jeffrey D. (2005): The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. New York: Penguin Books.

Commentary on Jade McGlynn’s book Putin’s War (2023), Part 3 of 5: Apathy, multiple narratives

Glynn research gave her the opportunity to understand some of the distinct elements she encountered in understanding Russian reporting and propaganda about the Ukraine War.

She notes that it is easy for Westerners to assume that “Russians have simply been brainwashed.” Given the long-standing stock images of Russian authoritarianism, it’s easy for Westerns to assume that such a thing is common in “totalitarian” countries, of which the democracy-vs.-autocracy dichotomy is a prominent current version. And just going along wtih a familiar assumption has the convenience of seeming obvious, without having to put much effort into thinking what, for instance, “brainwashing” might mean in this particular situation.

What Glynn explains is that Russia media – which is largely controlled by Putin-aligned oligarchs in an arrangement similar to that in Hungary – does provide a lot of information with a considerable amount of it packaged like infotainment aimed at drilling various narratives into the consciousness of low-information voters in particular. She describes the functioning this way:

These tactics can take their toll. Over the last eight years of watching Russian state media, there have been moments where I have paused to ask myself, what if they are right? The West does have its flaws, just think of the Iraq War, of the 2008 crash - what if Russia is right in saying that we (the West, NATO) are helping the Islamic State or have staged an attack? I have thought these thoughts in the comfort of Oxfordshire and in spite of the fact that I have access to all the sources and the education and freedom of movement to check the reality. Now, imagine someone without that access, who is not critically engaged with the media, but simply watches the news for information and has no reason to doubt it. In those cases, Russian propaganda could be very effective, latching onto your naivety and warping the world. (p. 78)

Why apathy is also a political stance

But she stresses that the effectiveness of such presentations depends on the condition that the “Kremlin propaganda is washing people's brains with things they do want to believe, helping them to stay within certain comfortable cognitive frameworks where they are the good guys and they've always been the good guys.” (my emphasis)

In other words, this approach is building on general outlooks formed by public education and the general cultural understanding in Russian society. She cautions against easy acceptance of narratives that such propaganda approaches function like some kind of high-tech brain implant. On the contrary, she writes that much of it is based rather on political apathy:

[I]f you think that any politics is just a form of cheating and so, capitalising on distrust, the Kremlin and its media assistants can shunt those actively opposed to the Kremlin's agenda into the apathetic grouping, not encouraging them to believe in the Kremlin view so much as to question the idea of objective reporting in general and especially in the West. (p. 80-81) [my emphasis]

The Steve Bannon approach, Russian-style

Steve Bannon, one of the convicted felon Donald Trump’s key politics advisers/strategists who himself served prison time for a crime on which his patron Trump couldn’t pardon him. Bannon has the dubious distinction of being most famous for articulating a political strategy based on the principle, “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” (1)

In other words, give the public a lot of different and even conflicting options of what to believe about a particular event or situation so they not only have various choices for which to pick, while simultaneously creating confusion about whether it’s even possible to tell what the reality is. Or least make it too tedious to try.

Glynn describes a similar approach in Russian reporting:

The Russian media's perversion of the facts is sometimes so horrible that it is hard to focus on much else, you feel almost compelled to stop everything and perform an autopsy on the truth. But in doing so, you allow Russian lies, rather than the crimes themselves, to become the focal point of criticism. This is a tried and tested technique for shifting the focus from moral aberration to an abstracted conversation about who is lying, who is exaggerating, what is truth and how we define reality. Perhaps some of the Russian opposition's tendencies towards introspection stem from not only how easy it is to fall into this trap but also their need to engage in a conversation with the Kremlin's form of reality, a need driven by the fact that most Russians (their putative voters) inhabit a world shaped by this (un)reality. (p. 98)

And she adds, “That may also explain why in many ways the techniques of the opposition and pro-Kremlin channels can appear complementary; for example, they both share a sarcastic and bitter humour and a relentless negativity in their depictions of the world.”

But this also takes part in a context where general patriotic and common assumptions about the virtue and value of the Russian nation and Russia’s role in the world. Russian patriotism has the value and limitation of its manifestations in other countries, as well. No matter how ugly the actual policy may be or how gruesome the conduct of Our Side’s armed forces may seem, it can be reframed “into a struggle for truth and salvation. Such a noble struggle requires a worthy opponent: Satan - or at least the West.”

Understanding the particular of a given situation is important. But all of this describes how nationalistic and patriotic assumptions function in wartime. The longer the war goes on, and the more hardships and problems it brings, the less inspiring patriotic certainties become.

Glynn stresses how widespread a Russia-centric assumption about Ukraine in particular is in Riussian society:

The war is so easily, readily and deliberately entangled with discussions of Russian identity, history, meaning and security because of Ukraine's pivotal importance to Russia's understanding of itself. But this also makes it dangerous and destabilising, meaning Russians are eager to find an acceptable answer to the question of why Ukrainians dislike them so much. This inevitably necessitates lies, as understanding the real reason would require Russians to unlearn their version of history, Russianness, and what their country has been up to in Ukraine [since 2014]. Most people are (wisely) reluctant to confront these questions. (p. 101) [my emphasis]

At the same time it’s important to remember that patriotism and nationalism produce powerful emotions that enable individuals and groups and nations to achieve extraordinary achievements in both peace and war, they are also powerful drugs that can induce people to follow leaders who make really bad decisions.

And not all causes are equal. There are international laws based broadly on the liberal tradition, which are aimed at preventing wars and at limiting the destructiveness of them when they happen. And not all causes are equal. France’s Algerian War, to take just one of many examples of colonial wars, inspired intense patriotic feelings on both sides. But Algeria was justified in fighting for its independence, and France’s often vicious attempts to suppress it was an unjust cause, not matter how deeply-felt French support for it may have been.

Centuries of evidence also tell us that patriotism is not only a powerful drug, it can have very destructive side-effects. Including spectacular misjudgments by national leaders in launching wars and underestimating the Other Side.

Next: Lasting effects of Russia’s difficult 1990s

Notes:

(1) Stelter, Brian (2021): This infamous Steve Bannon quote is key to understanding America’s crazy politics. CNN 11/16/2021. <https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html> (Accessed: 2024-21-08).

Commentary on Jade McGlynn’s book Putin’s War (2023), Part 2 of 5: How can we understand public discontent with the war among Russians

McGlynn makes an important point that is often ignored by Western commentators that even autocrats have to pay attention to public opinion. Rule by arbitrary terror is simply not possible on a perpetual basis. And while democracy-vs.-autocracy may be useful for framing a spectrum on which to understand types of government, the differences in governments are not purely binary.

The widely-cited V-Dem Institute of the University of Gothenburg groups countries into four broad types of regime: liberal democracy, electoral democracy, electoral autocracies, and closed autocracies based on a range of democratic and rule-of-law criteria. (1) For 2023, they classified Russia as an “electoral autocracy.” As Glynn observes:

[S]ince 2014, various academics have tried to gauge the reliability of Putin's popularity, with the most methodologically robust study using list experiments to conclude that, yes, he really is very popular. This shouldn't be surprising: it is easier to be an autocrat if you are popular, since you will still need to rely on millions of bureaucrats and citizens to get anything done. Tue alternative is to rule through the barrel of a gun but this is expensive and empowers your security forces, who could then overthrow you. (p. 20) [my emphasis]

Glynn’s book gives a good look at what a challenge it is to measure popular opinion in Russia, particularly on an ongoing war. In general, the psychological/anthropological response to a war getting underway is to “rally around the flag” on the default emotional response that Our Side is good and righteous and the Other Side is evil and vicious. And there are structural factors that make the Our Side Is Good position the popular one, from official government propaganda (or information operations, if we want to be polite) aimed at generating exactly that response. The “safe” default position until the war goes completely south tends to be the Hooray For Our Side stance.

Also, governments and political can and do impose sanctions against people who may be tempted to step outside the patriotic consensus. Ask the former university presidents of Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania how such pressure can work when brought to bear on a current foreign policy priority, in their cases the Gaza War of 2023-24 (and continuing), which drew broad bipartisan support from elected officials.

In Russia’s case, there were more explicit sanctions against dissenting in the current Ukraine War. Glynn reminds us:

[A]s has been well-documented, in Russia it is illegal to refer to the war in Ukraine as a war, instead you must call it a special military operation. It might sound unwieldy but there is a long tradition of such terminology. Both recent wars in Chechnya were classed as military operations, as was the Soviet war in Afghanistan - although admittedly after ten years this distinction was hard to sustain. The great benefit of a military operation is that it can be started and ended, whereas a war tends to be won or lost. Deploying the term 'special military operation' is also about managing the population's emotions and trying to not make the war appear too serious. lt is demobilising language, that helps to occlude the reality of war. Of course, Russia isn't the only country to use euphemistic language. The Troubles is a twee term for what was a civil war in a constituent nation of the UK. [my emphasis] (pp. 44-45)

This description gives a good glimpse at the multiple dilemmas involved in measuring Russian public opinion on the war. On the one hand, governments and politicians need to have some measure of what people actually think. On the other, people have understandable reservations about expressing opinions that could send them to jail:

The phone rings, it's a woman's voice, polite, official but with a disarming sweetness. After confirming your name and address and date of birth - all correct - she asks: 'Da you support the special military operation, or would you like to go to prison for fifteen years?'

This is what many Russians would hear when pollsters ask them about support for the war. lt is difficult to countenance the idea that anyone would feel comfortable expressing their dissent to an official sounding voice who knows their name and address, fully in the knowledge that spreading disinformation about the war risks fifteen years' incarceration. Most people simply refuse to answer, leading some sociologists to argue that the number of Russians who agree to respond to opinion polls has collapsed to an entirely unrepresentative level. According to Boris Kagarlitsky, before the war the Russian survey response rate was below 30 per cent, already low, but since the war it has wavered between 10 and 25 per cent. Can sociological polling with this level of responsiveness, and in an atmosphere where telling the truth carries a criminal sentence, be taken as reliable or representative?

One obvious answer would be, at least it can’t be simply taken at face value!

Even in countries that are functioning as liberal democracies, the rally-round-the-flag caution means that many people feel that it’s safer or at least socially more respectable to criticize the hardships associated with war. In the US, for instance, many people might consider it too edgy to say, I’m against War X. But they will say, “I’m not against the war, because the North Koreans/Chinese/Vietnamese/Afghan Commies/Sandinistas/Grenadians/Iraqis/Iranians/Serbians/Afghan Islamists are evil. But I don’t like the way it’s being fought, it’s taking too long, military conscription is a pain in the ass, the war is causing shortages, it’s causing inflation, it’s distracting from more important priorities, etc., etc.

During the Vietnam War, it became common for people to take a mixed hawk/dove position: “We never should have been there (Vietnam) in the first place. But now that we are there, we ought to win it!” If pressed further, “winning it” would typically turn out to be some magic fantasy of doing more of the same, or we-should-use-nukes-and-they-will-surrender-just-like-with-Horoshima.

In cases like today’s Russia where straightforward polling responses can’t give a good measure of actual opinion on the war, Glynn points to other types of measures that can at least be taken into account, such as low response rates on polls, some actual protests against the 2022 invasion immediately after it began. Emigration of draft-aged men would also be another possible indication of lack of enthusiasm for the war. But, as she notes, “leaving does not equate to opposition, not least because many of those who oppose the war may not have the money to leave Russia. Moreover, even of those who do oppose the war, the invasion of Ukraine was not always the direct cause of their emigration.”

Glynn’s book was published before Yevgeny Prigozhin’s strange military uprising in 2023. (2) The revolt was certainly an indication of some kind of serious discontent. But it would be hard to see that as a symptom of antiwar sentiment against Russia’s conflict in Ukraine. But it was definitely a complication for Putin’s government.

Next: Apathy, multiple narratives

Notes:

(1) Democracy Report 2024: Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot, 17. V-Dem Institute (University of Gothenburg) March 2024. >.

(2) Stanovaya, Tatiana (2023): Beneath the Surface, Prigozhin’s Mutiny has Changed Everything in Russia. Carnegie Politika 07/27/2023. (Accessed: 2024-19-08).

Commentary on Jade McGlynn’s book Putin’s War (2023), Part 1 of 5: How do Russian citizens understand the Russia-Ukraine War?

“Faced with a choice between a comforting lie and an inconvenient truth, many people will opt for the former.” – Jade McGlynn (1)

Jade McGlynn’s book Russia’s War draws on her extensive research on Russian legacy media and social media discussions of the Ukraine War are processed by Russians. The title of her book is a reflection of its focus, which is the ways in which Russian citizens express and understand their support of Russia’s war in Ukraine. As she explains:

[T]his book is not about [Russian opponents of the war], nor is it about the true believers, the soldiers committing atrocities- neither are representative groups. Instead, it is about the Russians who acquiesce to the war, the ordinary people, the majority. I have zero hope of solving the Russia 'enigma' with a neat label but I do want to probe the complexities of the context through which these same Russians understand their war.

In his 1992 book The Culture of Contentment, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith adopts a sardonic “anthropological” perspective of Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), the founder of the “institutional economics” trend of which Galbraith was a part. Galbraith was a sharp critic of militaristic attitudes and decisions of the US from the Vietnam War on. In Contentment, he explains:

Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat. The strategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause. This reaction is related not to economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology. As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is an assured tribal response. It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force. (2)

He continues directly:

But this does not last. It did not as regards the minor adventures in Grenada [1983] and Panama [1989], nor as regards the war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein [First Gulf War, 1991]. The effect of more widespread wars has been almost uniformly adverse. World War I, although it evoked the most powerful of patriotic responses at the time, has passed into history largely as a mindless and pointless slaughter. The party victoriously in power at the time, the Democrats, was rewarded in 1920 with a stern defeat at the polls. World War II, made inescapable by Japanese and German initiation or declaration of war, has survived with better reputation.

However, the Korean and Vietnam wars, both greatly celebrated in their early months, ended with eventual rejection of the wars themselves and of the administrations responsible. In the longer run, it cannot be doubted, serious war deeply disturbs the political economy of contentment.

I wouldn’t want to generalize this too much. But the is a great deal of evidence that most people in most countries would really prefer not to have wars. So, mobilizing the public and trying to keep them motivated to support or at least tolerate the war is a challenge for the governments at war. The basic techniques are largely the same, whether the cause is just in some objective sense or not. Although a legitimate cause tends to be an easier sale than other kinds.

Jade McGlynn’s book looks at the specific kinds of popular mobilization that occurred in Russia in 2022 for the Ukraine War and the ways in which it is founded in patriotically-coded narratives of Russian history. Which also makes her book a good example of a trend not at all unique to Russia of how people use their understandings of their country’s past to make sense of events in the present.

Putinist ideology

Western audiences and particularly American ones are tempted to assume Russia is a conformist state with a more-or-less common view dictated by the authorities, whether it was the Czarist Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or the post-1991 Russia. Obviously, under the Czar there were movements aiming at reforms, democratization, and even anti-capitalist revolution. The Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991 (3) was always undergoing debates over politics, as the Trotskyist split and the various party purges illustrated. The official Marxist ideology meant in practice that the doctrinal debates that had always been present in European Marxism were sometimes elevated to a high level of intensity, even fatal intensity. But there were always debates and divisions even in the USSR, though they were conducted largely within the confines of the broad official doctrine.

Briefly stated, official present-day Russian identity is not as sharply identified in official texts is the same doctrinaire way common during the Soviet period. And while the Russian leaders cultivate groups they hope to influence in other countries, that also is not done in the manner of the Soviet-aligned international Communist Parties of the Soviet era. Sometimes there may be echoes of it, as in the various agreements and informal alliances that Putin’s United Russia party concluded over the last decade. Including a five-year “cooperation accord” with H.C. Strache’s Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) in 2016. Putin has also encouraged in various ways the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, the pro-Brexit Leave movement in Britain, Marine Le Pen’s party in France National Rally (RN), and Matteo Salvini’s League party in Italy. (4)

However, the dominant ideological outlook among Putin and the current ruling oligarchy in Russia is nationalistic, while the Communist ideology of the USSR was “internationalist.” For an internationalist movement, it made at least superficial logical sense for foreign Communist Parties to recognize the Soviet Communist Party as the leading force in what they understood as an unfolding world revolution. In that perspective, what was good for the Soviet Union as a country was also best for the Communist movement elsewhere. (5)

A Russian nationalist ideology can hardly claim that particular perspective. But that doesn’t prevent Putin from encouraging nationalist movements like Brexit or the Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party in Hungary. A rightwing Nationalist International sounds like a conceptually schizophrenic term. But the fascist movement of the 1920s and 1930s was also very much a international phenomenon, with cooperation between fascist movements in various countries.

Russia and the “Little Patriotic War” (against Ukraine)

The nationalist perspective promoted by Putin’s government internally isn’t a strictly doctrinaire one. Glynn quotes from an interview “with an official working for the Ministry of Culture” about how the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany (better known in the West as the Second World War) is a central historical symbol used to inspire and justify Russian patriotism. He told her:

[T]he obsession with streamlining history is so all-encompassing because [the authorities] worry there is nothing there. Ever since Yeltsin there has been this struggle to articulate: why does Russia exist, why should it exist? And against the backdrop of separatism, which are issues that could flare up, this is an essential question. After the USSR collapsed, we could not cohere our people around rejecting the Soviet experience, people didn't buy that it was something done to them, not by them. And so we didn't have an idea, because we have so many different nations and languages and time zones - how do you bring that together? Those in power had no idea but we couldn't go on that way. Russia is not Canada - we need something to justify our existence. So they turned to history to ignite patriotism, to the Great Patriotic War in particular but also to some imperial paradigms, particularly around Ukraine, Novorossiya and so on. (p. 146)

The Great Patriotic War was also a central theme in postwar Soviet politics and historiography and a key part of the historical narrative justifying the Soviet regime in general.

As it is for Britain and the US and other countries in the anti-Axis alliance. For the US, it still functions as the Good War that justifies America’s various military adventures around the world. At least to American citizens at the beginning of a new conflict.

She also explains why this perspective encourages the narrative of Ukrainians as Nazis, and the Russia War goal as seeking to oust such Nazis.

The notion of Ukrainians as Nazis is really a support act to a description of the war in Ukraine as a Little Patriotic War, or rerun of the Great Patriotic War (Soviet war against Nazi Germany 1941-1945). … Looking at my data, the intensity of this analogy has waxed and waned since 2014, with a relatively flat use of the narrative between late 2015 and 2018, and a marked lull from 2019 to early 2021. However, there was a sharp increase around February 2021 and into April 2021 when Russia began massing troops on the border with Ukraine before returning most of them to base. As discussed, references to Nazis, banderovtsy and the Great Patriotic War again increased with Russia's February 2022 invasion. (p.62)

Banderovtsy is a term referring people acting in the tradition of Stefan Bandera (1909-1959), a Ukrainian nationalist who was anti-Soviet in his orientation. He was eventually assassinated in Munich. He was an activist and leader in the part of Ukraine held by Poland in the interwar period in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). After Nazi Germany seized that territory in 1939. As KaI Struve writes:

The OUN had supported the German attack on Poland in September 1939 because it hoped to be able to establish a Ukrainian state in the predominantly Ukrainian territories in southeastern Poland with German help. But these hopes were bitterly disappointed by the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939, under which the Ukrainian territories of Poland were occupied by the Soviet Union. From the point of view of the OUN, the Soviet Union was the most threatening enemy of the Ukrainians. The memory of the Holodomor [Ukrainian famine] and the repressions of the 1930s played a role in this. As did the fear that Soviet rule would eventually be accompanied by a renewed linguistic and cultural Russification. (6)

So, yes, Bandera and the OUN were pro-Nazi in that sense, though the OUN was not a part of the Nazi Party. Also pro-Nazi in the following sense. While the old leadership of the OUN under Andrij Melnyk operated in the German-occupied part of Poland (the General Government), the majority of the organization led by Bandera pushed for active nationalist resistance against the Soviets:

The Abwehr, the German Wehrmacht’s military intelligence service did not start cooperation with the Bandera-OUN until the spring of 1941, in the months before the German attack on the Soviet Union. It alone had strong underground structures in the Soviet territories. The Wehrmacht's interest in this cooperation was, for one thing, that the OUN would provide information from the Soviet territories, but above all that it should prepare an uprising in the Soviet rear for the time of the German attack. Only the Bandera-OUN was able to do both, but not the Melnyk Group.

Both parts of the OUN and other Ukrainian exile groups supported the German attack on the Soviet Union, as they once again hoped to be able to found a Ukrainian state with German support. Immediately after the occupation of the western Ukrainian capital Lviv, Bandera's deputy Yaroslav Stetsko declared the establishment of the Ukrainian state and the installation of a Ukrainian government here on June 30, 1941. Simultaneously, the OUN initiated Ukrainian administrations and local militias in many places, which it viewed as the basis for the formation of a Ukrainian state. The Germans, however, rejected the founding of the state. When Bandera and Stezko refused to disband them, they were arrested on July 5 and 9 respectively, taken to Berlin, and later imprisoned in a special section of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until the fall of 1944. In the weeks following their arrest, Bandera and Stetsko continued to try to convince the Germans to change their policy towards Ukraine. However, Hitler had already decided on July 16, 1941, that there should be no Ukrainian state, but that the Ukrainian territories should be placed under direct German rule and subjected to a brutal regime of oppression and exploitation.

In other words, Bandera’s OUP was pro-Nazi in the hope of getting a Ukrainian state out of it, and they supported the German invasion of the USSR until Hitler made it clear that there would be no state of Ukrainians who the Nazis considered Untermenschen. Struve also notes whether we could classify the OUP as “fascist” would depend on the specific definition applied, but it certainly comes close. (7)

The current Russian government picked up the Soviet tradition of blending Banderovtsy and Nazis into the enemies of Russia. McGlynn notes this habit began as early as Ukraine’s formal independent in 1991:

The Kremlin only intensified its accusations following the Revolution of Dignity [aka, the Euromaidan of 2014] and annexation of Crimea, which Putin justified by claiming that Ukrainians intended to ethnically cleanse the peninsula and country of all Russians: 'Everyone can already teil exactly what they will do next, these Ukrainian heirs to the Bandera ideology, to a man who collaborated with Hitler during WWII [ ... ] they will try to create an ethnically pure Ukrainian state.’ (p. 63)

She writes of the various and even conflicting accusations the Russian government and media make about Nazis and Hitler and the aggressive goals of Ukraine and the West:

[T]he use of historical analogies simultaneously adds a sense of predictability, covers up logical inconsistencies (by providing a temporal consistency) and reinforces the hero/victim dynamic. Russian audiences are led to believe that history will repeat itself, either as triumph or as tragedy. For example, before the 2022 summer, United Russia MPs received instructions from the party leadership to stress the following analogies: Stalingrad and Poltava, basically symbols or bywords for existential and bloody conflict fought against the West. For many watching, such analogies will frighten them into defensive loyalty, while for others the knowledge that Russia won then, so it will win now, calms them into ritual support.

Basing themselves on the perspective of historian Timothy Snyder, Lothar Gorris and Tobias Rapp write:

The Soviet Union under Stalin had never had a clear position on fascism [?!?], it even made itself Hitler's ally in the Hitler-Stalin Pact and thus made the Second World War possible in the first place. After the war, however, the Soviet Union declared not only the attackers fascists, but also all those by whom the leadership felt threatened or whom it did not particularly like. "Fascist" was just another word for enemy. Putin's regime thrives on Soviet legacy: Russia's enemies are always fascists. ... Anyone who argues with "fascism" and "Nazism" justifies a war and crimes against humanity. Nazi means: Someone is not a human being. [He is] someone Russians are allowed to kill." (8)

While that is a good clarification of how the current Soviet leadership uses the word, the brief historical sketch is inevitably fuzzy. The Non-Aggression Treaty between the USSR and Germany of 1939-1941 (aka, Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler-Stalin Pact) did not involve the Soviet Union declaring itself to be “fascist” during that period. And while the Soviets were willing to extend the fascist label at times to rivals in the international socialist and Communist worlds (Social Democrats, Yugoslavia, China), they actually did have a definition of fascism. The Comintern (Communist International) defined it as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” (9)

But it gives added perspective to why the Russians today still call their opponents in Ukraine fascists. To muddy the waters a bit more, Timothy Snyder argues that Putin’s regime is actually fascist. But even Trump calls his opponents both Communists and fascists. Well-known insult words get used in many different ways.

Glynn’s account is not only interesting in the current context of the Russia-Ukraine War. It’s also a reminder that people’s understanding of the past and present are not independent of each other. And that there is no strict wall separating fact from fiction and reflection from drama in how a broad public understands issues of current concern. Especially when it comes to wars.

And her larger discussion of the public information flow on the war inside Russia is a good contextual reminder that the point of propaganda and “public information” campaigns does not have to be true or even convincing to the effective.

Next: How can we understand public discontent with the war among Russians.

Notes:

(1) McGlynn, Jade (2023): Russia’s War, 190. Cambridge UK & Hoboken USA: Polity Press.

(2) Galbraith, John Kenneth (1992): The Culture of Contentment, 166-7.

(3) The Soviet Union was formally founded in 1922, after the Civil War had been mostly resolved, but its origin was the 1917 October Revolution. It was formally dissolved in 1991.

(4) Reimon, Michel & Zelechowkski, Eva (2017): Putins rechte Freunde. Wie Europas Populisten ihre Nationen verkaufen. Wien: Falter Verlag.

(5) This position at times proved quite embarrassing for the affiliated Communist parties. Particularly during the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939-41. There are good reasons to argue that from the view of immediate Soviet interests, it was a coldly pragmatic decision given the options that Britain and France were giving them at the moment. Defending it on leftwing anti-imperialist grounds was a particularly awkward task for those who took that position.

On that agreement, see: Der Hitler-Stalin-Pakt. Der Krieg und die europäische Erinnerung. Osteuropa 59:7-8 (2009).

(6) Struve, Kai (2022): Stepan Bandera: Geschichte, Erinnerung und Propaganda, Ukraine-Analyse Nr. 270. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb) 22.06.2022. <https://www.bpb.de/themen/europa/ukraine-analysen/nr-270/509748/analyse-stepan-bandera-geschichte-erinnerung-und-propaganda/> (Accessed: 2024-13-08). My translation from German.

(7) Ibid.

(8) Gorris, Lothar & Rapp, Tobias (2024): Die Heimlichen Hitler. Der Spiegel 17.08.2024, 12. My translation from German.

(9) For an elaboration of the Comintern positions as it stood in 1935, see: Dimitrov, Georgi (1935): The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism 08/02/1935. Marxists.org <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm> (Accessed: 2024-20-08).