Michael Ignatieff: The History That Got Us Here

Since the dispassion and balance to which history aspires is beyond us all, the best we can do is to try to grasp some elements of this change in the course of history, though we cannot tell whether it is leading us to the rocks perhaps or out to the open sea. It is worth trying to figure out what's happening even when the guns are still firing, because it is painful to be lost and some understanding can help us balance moral fury with strategic prudence. Even so, no narrative, except those in the grip of nationalist exaltation can offer any consolation, since, if we are honest, we know that narratives cannot tell us the one thing we want to know: how this story will turn out and whether we will survive it.

All history is beset with the problem of infinite regress, of knowing when any story truly starts. Where you start narratives depends on where you want to end up.

Many Western analysts say it all began with Putin's declaration of war against the West at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, followed in 2008 by his war against Georgia, and after that the seizure of Donbass and Crimea in 2014. But Putin's own history of this war, the one he wrote himself and published last year as compulsory reading for his troops, begins in the 9th century AD, with Vladimir and the conversion of the Slavs, and the birth of the Orthodox Church in Kiev. Putin knows where he wants to end up, so his history begins with the claim that since Russia began in Kyiv, Kyiv must belong to Russia.

The ex- KGB officer turned historian is hardly original. Most histories of Russia start where he starts, with the claim that Volodmyr the prince who accepted Christian baptism to align his princedom with Constantinople and Byzantium is the true origin of all the exercises in Russian state formation that came afterwards: Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation. What's new with Putin is the use of this very old story to deny another country its right to exist. Thanks to Putin, a Russia that Western observers have unkindly called a gas station with nuclear weapons gets a grand and aggrandizing myth of origins, and the actual government that rules in Kyiv, amid the shrines of that first foundation of Orthodox Christianity in the Slav world, is told your country is not yours, but mine.

The powerful do what they want, the weak do what they must, said Thucydides. That an ex-KGB officer, skilled in martial arts, in killing with his own fingers, should feel burdened by the need for a spiritual myth of origins is interesting. Why bother with one at all? If you have the tanks, the artillery, the ships, why not just take what you want? Putin did not bother with justification when journalists were shot on their doorstep, when opposition politicians died within sight of the Kremlin walls, when agents poisoned a supposed enemy of the state in a cathedral town in another country. No justifications were offered then only denials. Yet for the invasion of a sovereign state, he felt obliged to build a whole cathedral of historical fantasy. Because he felt guilty? Unlikely. Because he had to offer his people something to believe in? Even a dictatorship has to offer reasons. Hitler had his suffering Sudetens, Putin his suffering Russians, groaning under the Ukrainian yoke. But he didn't content himself with these low-octane justifications. He was reaching for a grander register altogether.

Because, it appears, he was seeking to enter history himself, by restoring the Russian empire of Peter and Catherine, the Russia from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea. But claiming these glorious associations invites troubling comparisons. If you wanted to truly emulate Peter and Catherine, you would have had to open Russia up, as they did, to science and technology and new ideas, so perhaps, on further reflection, greatness of their sort was not his goal. His actual objective, much more easily achieved, was not to be glorified but to be hated and feared-- by the Ukrainians first of all, but especially those arrogant Europeans and Americans. His model was not so much Peter and Catherine, but Tsar Nicholas I who crushed the Decembrist uprising in 1825 and made himself the gendarme of Europe until his death twenty-five years later, hated by the Poles whose independence he crushed in 1831, hated by the Hungarians whose rebellion he subdued in 1849. The continuities in Putin's use of power are written deep into the texture of Russian autocracy. In the 20th century, the Soviets kept to this pattern, sending the tanks into Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, and imposing martial law on Warsaw in 1981. The mold was set from the end of the 18th century: no Russian state, Tsarist or Soviet, would tolerate a free state on its borders.

To achieve this goal-to be feared like the Tsars of old-- he attended to the creation of a historical myth with the same meticulous care that he gave to crushing internal opposition, supporting Assad's destruction of the Syrian people, rebuilding his military forces and eliminating his internal rivals. He looked upon history writing as a strategic operation. It is said he crafted the essay he published last summer himself, with minions bringing him historical documents down the long tunnel separating him from his people, in his dacha outside Moscow. He labored for months. It's all his own work, a narrative denying the place that calls Kyiv its capital was ever a country or its people ever a people.

One of the considerable advantages of being President is that, all alone in your dacha, your historical imagination can take flight. It faces no limit, no actual engagement with reality. So you are free to claim that the country is run by Nazis when its government is led by a Jew, and when the Russian speakers you claim to be intervening to protect face no threat at all.

For narrative inventions of this kind to pass from fantasy to the legitimization of an actual invasion, two things need to be in place: first a totalitarian space in which independent journalism has been crushed, university faculties of history have been silenced, NGO's have been neutered as foreign agents and state television carries your message to the furthest reaches of Siberia. This ensures that once our message is sent out across the many time zones of Russia, you only ever hear the echo and re-echo of your own voice, reaching deep into the psyches of a Russian audience that, thanks to having been entirely severed from the outside world, remains locked, frozen even, in a sentimental nostalgia for a Soviet past that makes any clear-eyed encounter with present reality impossible.

Since even Putin knows that the Soviet past has, shall we say, a few problematic areas, his re-working of the Soviet narrative turned out to be complex, even ingenious. He is on record as believing the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe in 20th century, and doubtless his own memory of burning KGB codebooks in the back gardens of a safe house in Dresden as the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 is painful for him, a traumatic moment he is sure to want to avenge. Yet for all his worship of the Soviet past, his essay blamed Khrushchev for handing Crimea over to Ukraine in 1955, and blamed Lenin for giving Ukraine a federated state in the Soviet Union at the end of the Civil War. It's an inconvenience that Stalin and Lenin should have acknowledged the Ukrainian national identity whose very existence he denies. So his use of the Soviet past is strictly instrumental, discarding what he doesn't like, while taking care to protect his remaining source of legitimacy-- that his regime is the rightful heir of the one that saved the world from Hitler. Accordingly, commentators predict that the projected Donbass' operations' end date might well be May 9, the holy day when the standards of Hitler's legions were laid down in Red Square and Stalin presided over the victory parade marking the end of the war in Europe.

If Putin does succeed in marching victorious veterans of the Donbass operation through Red Square this May 9, a truly astonishing transmutation, a kind of reverse alchemy, in which gold is turned into dross, will have occurred for the one untrammeled moral good of the Soviet era, the one achievement acknowledged by the Soviet empire's friends as well as its foes, that Russian troops fought their way into Auschwitz saved Europe from Hitler's racial empire, all this fine legend has been dragged into the Ukrainian mud as a legitimation for a sorry, criminal act of savagery against a neighboring state.

Every society lies about itself all the time, but there are some lies which can kill its future. Such are the impermissible lies, and societies get rare opportunities-the United States in 1865, Germany in 1945, South Africa in 1994, to draw up the short list of things it will never say about itself again, such as 'Slavery was good for black people'. 'Hitler was right about the Jews'. 'Apartheid was not so bad' etc. Russia had the chance in 1991, to say "Never again Stalin." It could have reckoned with his Gulag, with the millions who died at the hands of his regime; but instead a narcotized silence descended after the collapse of the last land empire in Europe and no reckoning was ever made. Western advisers have their share of blame here: by instructing the new governors of Russia that history didn't matter and that only shock therapy and rapid conversion to a market economy were necessary to rescue a country from 80 years of tyranny. It was not as if there had not been Russian voices who had told the truth about the past all along, but they were not listened to, in the mad rush to be as Western, as quickly, as painlessly, as forgetfully as possible. The consciences of the country-Akhmatova, Brodsky, Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn-- never got the chance to imprint their message on their country's soul. There were no truth commissions, as there were in South Africa, no public hearings, and more saliently, no prosecution of KGB torturers and agents. In the wild west of the 1990's, as state property was privatized, as everyone plundered what they could, no reckoning was made with the haunted past. Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, they were just poetry, just literature. Their words had no premonitory force with the present generation. In this carnival of amnesia, a blank page was created on which Putin could write his 'narrative' and justify an invasion as a vindication of Russian history's red thread, its story of expansion and conquest.

It is no accident, as they say, that in the weeks before Putin launched the invasion, his regime should have finally shut down Memorial, the last remaining Russian organization seeking to tell the truth about the Russian. And so now, a regime feels entirely liberated from any relation to the truth. It uses the Security Council chamber in New York to spew out hysterical falsehoods, it lies to the parents of the soldiers who've shed their lives for a criminal enterprise and the whole catastrophe leaves Russian most entrepreneurial and critical people, anyone with a nodding acquaintance to their country's actual history in the 21st century, with no choice but to flee their country to Yerevan, Tbilisi, Istanbul, the only places left that will take them in.

This here is this unconscionable war, launched by a Russian President who believes that a neighboring country is not a real country and its people not a real people; the here is the resilient refusal of those same people to accept their fate; the here is the collapse of the rules governing the international order; the here is our fear of a future that looks as bleak as those blackened ruins of Mariupol.

There is a history that got us here-a tangled skein of forces, personalities, missed chances, aspirations, fears as well as hatreds-and in years to come, we may untangle some of it, but until then, we will have to work with and against the 'narratives'-the stories used to justify, rationalize, excuse and explain what has just occurred. Narratives always claim they are history, but if they were, narratives would surrender to the truth, and the past would not, as William Faulkner once said, refuse to die. The past would become the past, the common ground on which contending parties could stand and argue about the future together. But narratives are recalcitrant: all sides resist believing the facts, and so, long after the guns fall silent, we will still be fighting over the meaning of this moment.

II

Putin's historical essay of last summer turns out to be a document with predictive value. It tells us what his war aims are: he will not be satisfied with Donbas, with Mariupol and its land bridge, with the gas fields in the sea of Azov or control of most of the Black Sea Coast. It is the entire country that he wishes to eliminate. If he cannot have it all now, he will bide his time until he can have it later. Now that Ukraine has fought him off at the gates of Kyiv, he is bound to try again. If he tries again and once again is beaten off, he will settle, but only provisionally, for a wrecked and devastated Ukraine prostrate on his border. And if his own defeat were to loom, his knowledge of history tells him that Russian regimes that fail in battle-as the Tsarist regime did in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905-enter their death throes. Any Russian leader in the grip of a history-making fantasy who then faces humiliation on the battlefield is profoundly dangerous, especially one with his hands on the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.

He is especially dangerous because he must be angry. His military have failed him. His intelligence services have lied to him. The Ukrainians have ripped apart his account of reality and forced him to confront the stubborn resilience of a people he tells himself do not exist. His actual understanding of Ukraine stands revealed as being stuck in the early 1990's. In that transitional era, when Ukraine was ruled by the likes of Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma, the mediocrities typical of the late Soviet era, the rulers in Moscow could believe that there was nothing left in Kyiv or Lviv but a former Soviet people digging themselves out of the ruins of the empire. The man Putin sought to place in control of Ukraine in 2010, Viktor Yanukovych, was cut from this Soviet cloth: the same laminated hair-style, the same wooden language, the same shameless greed. In his cynicism, Putin must have thought Ukrainians deserved no better. But they had other ideas.

Putin failed to understand his opponent, but NATO and the EU's leaders made precisely the same mistake.

They too thought Ukrainians were a still Sovietized, passive, fatalistic, submissive, resigned to the inevitable. These preconceptions inspired all those predictions that the war that began on February 24, would be over in a week. Everyone - Putin, the West - failed to notice that Ukrainians wanted to make their own history. If some Western observers did notice that the Orange Revolution had overthrown a pro-Russian government in 2005, and that the Maidan uprising in 2014 had overthrown Yanukovych, the West sentimentalized these episodes as a good news story about people's power and not the elemental transformation of Ukrainian identity that they turned out to be. Maidan was not a winter carnival of revolt, but something much grimmer and more formative: a brutal battle between Birkut, the hated armed police of the regime, and unarmed but implacably determined young people, played out in running street battles over 92 frigid winter nights. More than a hundred insurgents were killed, and once and for all, older Ukrainians understood, from the brutality with which their children were repressed, that they could no longer live under a regime that promised fealty to Vladimir Putin. The Maidan crowd also expressed Ukraine's fervent desire to to set out on a journey to the West and to join the European Union. It is one of the many tragic ironies of this story that the Europeans who turned out to believe most passionately in the European ideal were those whom Europe refused to grant entry. Yet belief in the ideal still endures.

Maidan is why the Ukrainian President can live without joining NATO, but not with the idea that he will never join Europe. Maidan is also why Europe's failure to give whatever survives of Ukraine a path to EU membership would be a betrayal never to be forgiven.

Maidan should have taught Putin that he was dealing with a people who would resist him to the death. Instead, it taught him, that if he couldn't rule Kyiv through a surrogate of his own choosing, he should take what he could of Ukrainian territory as quickly as possible. So followed his seizure of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk and the green men parachuted into Crimea. Then followed eight years of grinding warfare in the trenches and blasted villages of Eastern Ukraine.

Yet again, neither the West nor Putin fully understood how transformational of the identity of Ukraine the war in the East would prove to be. Iron seems to have entered the souls of Ukrainians in this struggle, and the eight years of war seems to have revolutionized the Ukrainian army, turning it from a Soviet to a national force. So when the West discovered the lethal effectiveness of Ukrainian small arms platoons in the defense of Kyiv, our surprise was tinged with condescension. We had failed to see what adversity, what genuine existential threat, can do to a people's psyche-not to mention their military preparedness. Everything surprised us, even a former comedian's transformation into a war leader, with a showman's gift for communication.

Now we are no longer surprised, we run the risk of sentimental bad faith. Ukrainians are fighting for our values, but we are not the ones who are doing the dying. Like the Afghans before them, Ukrainians have discovered how painful it is to be someone else's proxy. Proxies fight the battles, but they learn, ruefully, that they are on their own if they face defeat. Ukrainians now accept they cannot have the air cover they desperately need, lest NATO aircraft and Russian planes and missiles lock onto each other and we all get dragged into World War III. The Hungarians learned the same painful lesson in '56; the Czechs in '68 and the Poles in '81.

If this is the painful reality, then, as Russian tanks and artillery mass for the assault on the Donbass, the Ukrainians can hope to hold them, but without NATO air cover, they cannot hope to drive them out and retake their lost territories. If Ukraine cannot reconquer Donbass, or Mariupol and the coast, the Zelensky government may have to settle for a peace that leaves these in Russian hands. This will be painful indeed. Such a denouement recalls how the Finnish winter war against Stalin's divisions ended in March 1940. The war went well for the Finnish defenders at first. Small arms units fighting to defend their home territory were more than a match for superior Russian firepower, but eventually the Russian tanks broke through the Mannerheim line and forced the Finns to accept a peace that ceded national territory to the invaders. When the Finnish President signed the peace-deal, he said, 'Let the hand wither that signs this monstrous treaty', words that President Zelensky may come to understand only too well.

III

War always shatters illusions. Putin now knows his intelligence services and his military lied to him. He knows that a Ukraine exists and that its people will fight to the death. His own regime, his own survival, is now in question, and dictators cornered by history and by their own follies are both dangerous and unpredictable.

He also has had the disagreeable discovery that another one of his narratives proved wrong: the irretrievable decadence of the United States and its alliance system. Dictators have often mistaken the squabbles and divisions intrinsic to democracy as signs of weakness, and they have often been taken in by Western jeremiads of decline and fall. On the contrary, both NATO and the EU have been slapped awake. The danger he faces now is that in the wake of Bucha, in the wake of Mariupol, Western passion may overcome its prudence. It is a danger, in fact, for all of us.

We are struggling to balance our conviction that something terribly wrong has happened with the obligation not to allow moral indignation to choose those instruments that would result, against our own intentions, in a war that destroys Europe. So we will have to shut our ears to desperate pleas from people who have been truly wronged; we will have to reject calls to repay like with like. Hopefully, we will be cunning: choosing those instruments, instead, that impose sacrifice upon us-an embargo on Russian oil and gas for example-without pitching our world into an abyss.

In its disappointment at our prudence, Ukraine has awakened from its illusions about NATO and the EU. It once thought NATO membership was possible. Now it will accept armed neutrality. It once thought EU membership was within its grasp. Now it knows it will be a long road to membership if ever.

Ukraine's geography is, like all geographies, a country's destiny. It might not have been so, had Russia taken a democratic path on the two occasions when this was possible-after 1905, when defeat forced the Tsars to grant a constitution, and after 1991, when for a brief moment, a democratic opportunity was available to Yeltsin's Russia-but when Russia took an authoritarian path after 1999, Ukraine's shared border with Russia means it will have to forge a democratic path in the teeth of regimes-even ones that succeed Putin-who treat the freedom of others as a mortal threat to their own survival.

The war has also shattered illusions in the West, the most basic of which was that, with the end of the Soviet Empire, we had entered an age beyond war itself. Now we have re-learned something our great grandparents discovered already in 1914, that the economic integration of geostrategic rivals is no guarantee of peace. We are shedding the further illusion that nuclear weapons make great power war impossible. Not if tactical nuclear weapons exist. Not if a dictator believes his fall is imminent.

We are in genuinely uncharted territory, a place where the history, the analogies, the parallels give out, and we are truly on our own, living the news from moment to moment, wondering, for example, what the sinking of a cruiser in the Black Sea does to our chances of avoiding nuclear war.

We know, finally, that we have left behind the world our grandparents bequeathed to us, the world of Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill and Truman, the world of the UN Charter and its guarantee of the inviolability of state and a monopoly on the legitimate use of force vested in the Security Council alone. We knew these rules had been honored more in the breach than in the observance, but they were such principle as there was to be had in the world of international relations. We also knew that Russia was hardly the only Security Council member whose violence and brutality have weakened these pillars of the international order. It is not pleasant to watch the Russians reminding the US and its allies that Russia was not the first to launch interventions in other sovereign states without the approval of the United Nations, not the first, to destroy villages in order to save them, not the first to lie to the international community. It is not agreeable to realize that NATO is paying the price for Kosovo 1999, for believing that an intervention might be legitimate, even if it was not lawful.

The Russians objected then, and they are cashing in now. The US is now paying the price for Iraq 2003, for believing that the world would line up behind the overthrow of a lethal tyranny. When it US looks around the UN, it discovers India, Indonesia, the Middle Eastern states, the Venezuela's and Nicaragua's of Latin America, and above all, China, standing on the other side. Judging by the number of abstentions in recent UN votes, Russia is less alone in the world than the US might wish it to be. The US and Europe may believe they are facing up to Russian imperialism, but much of the world believes this is, on the contrary, a Russian response to American imperialism. Such is the price a super-power pays for breaking the rules it pledged to uphold.

So the war, finally, can be understood as a reckoning the West has to make with its own role in the weakening the international legal order. Equally, however, the claim that the West brought all of this upon itself- by violating international law in Kosovo and Iraq, by making vain promises of NATO enlargement to Georgia and Ukraine, by extending NATO to the Russian frontier-lets Putin off the hook. It is an imperial cast of mind to believe that the only agents, for good or ill, in this world are the Americans, or the Chinese, or the Russians. This is realism, supposedly, but it denies the historical agency that turns out to matter just as much as the will of the strong: the agency of small peoples, the Baltics, the Eastern Europeans who when the wall came down in 1989 begged for a NATO security guarantee to give their own fledgling democracies a chance of survival. And what is the Ukrainian cause but the desire of a small nation-one of the weak ones in Thucydides Melian Dialogue-who defend their right to remain free, side by side a great power. This is the same agency that the Taiwanese are claiming, this right to make your own history, to write your own narrative, despite geography, despite hostility of greater powers, despite everything. In the ruins of the world of our grandparents, the world of 1945, this is at least one desire that seems worth defending: the right of a small people to write its own history, and to do so in peace.