Did Putin Want This?
When I was a young(ish) analyst back in the day, tracking and assessing Russian economics and defense spending, I marveled a bit at the economic change from the bad old Soviet days. Sure, there was corruption and cronyism, but Russia had opened up, and the videos and photos I was seeing from there were nothing like the grey poverty I experienced when I lived there with my family.
You see, I came to the United States from the USSR as a child. My memories were of standing in an interminable line with my mom for a bottle of milk and some bread, living in a tiny apartment, and having to get water for baths, flushing the toilet, and cooking from an old factory across the street, carrying a bucket or a tea pot, filling it with water from a rusty faucet, and taking it back to the apartment. I remember wearing the same clothes every day for a week, and only being able to bathe every few days. I remember being excited to get a meal at school, when I had to stay longer while both my parents worked. I remember seeing thick, greasy marker lines blacking out tracts of text in certain books, censoring what the authorities did not want us to read. But mostly, my memories are all grey, with bits of color splashed across my mind - the red neckerchief I wore as a member of the Pioneers (the Soviet youth organization that promoted unity and patriotism), the little red star I wore on my black school uniform with a small, gold relief of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a green little table, painted with pink flowers, in our tiny apartment that I used as my desk to do my schoolwork…
So to see people living open lives, wearing colorful clothes, eating in restaurants, and even driving cars, once the USSR fell was fascinating. It was not at all the way I remembered Russia - or more accurately, Ukraine, where I was born (in those days, there was no difference).
As an analyst, I was suspicious by nature, so seeing Russia open up gave me an uneasy feeling. At one point, I thought of a short story concept: What if Russia’s integration into the global economy was all a part of Vladimir Putin’s long-term plan to make the world dependent on Russia’s energy exports, so that when Russia started invading its neighbors, like it did with Georgia in 2008, the rest of the world would be loath to punish it for fear of energy shortages?
Fast forward to today, and I’m watching with horror the events in Ukraine. The Russian forces murdering women, children, clerics, and even a US journalist. The Russian economy is projected to contract by 15 percent or more this year alone because of the severity of sanctions imposed in response to Putin’s actions in Ukraine. Western companies are leaving Russia in droves - McDonald’s, Apple, apparel firms, Coca-Cola, Sony, Nintendo and others have announced they are getting out of Russia. Major shipping companies are refusing to sail there. Energy companies are backing out.
Meanwhile, thousands of Russians are being imprisoned for protesting Putin’s actions in Ukraine. Russia has been censoring information and criticism about the war, and Putin has announced that executives of companies in Russia who criticize the government would be arrested and the companies’ assets would be seized.
For anyone who has spent any time in the Soviet Union, this is a very familiar nightmare. Economic decline, disinformation, appropriation of assets, isolation, imprisonment of those opposing the government…
And yet, Noah Rothman writes in Commentary Magazine that Putin seems quite pleased with the result of his country’s nosedive into the Soviet cesspool.
Amid all this, Putin seems quite pleased with himself. The Russian president’s disconnection from reality is near total. “The Soviet Union always lived under sanctions and succeeded,” the hidebound autocrat asserted this week. If Putin considers the Soviet Union’s history of violence, repression, economic stagnation, and self-dissolution a success, it’s hard to imagine that he can conceive of failure. Indeed, from his perspective, the invasion of Ukraine and all its attendant hardships is a success.
I would disagree with the assessment that Putin is somehow pleased with himself or that he really considers the return to the bad old Soviet days a success. My assessment is that he’s desperately trying to pretend this is what he wanted from the start because he cannot appear to be anything other than strong and flawless.
Putting his foreign intelligence team on house arrest and blaming them for providing bad intelligence about Ukraine (after all, the Russian forces are still unable to topple major cities, including Kyiv and Russia calling in Chechen thugs and Middle-Eastern “volunteers” as reinforcements) is particularly telling about just how bad this invasion has been for Russia. Yes, Putin wanted to transform Russia back into a superpower - a derzhava. However, although he spent years integrating Russia into the global economy and ensuring that the West was dependent on Russia’s energy exports, he still never let go of the old Soviet notions about defense spending, approving a significant state armament program in 2011 to modernize the Russian armed forces, and prompting the resignation of widely respected Finance Minister Alexey Kurdin that year. He wanted a military superpower as well as an economic one.
Putin probably assessed that the West had too much vested interest in Russia to do anything but message its displeasure with insignificant sanctions like it did after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. And although Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien tried to defend his boss’s record on Russia by claiming that there was nearly nothing left to sanction in Russia in 2020, turns out that there was plenty more.
O'BRIEN: "We want all of them to stay out of the election and what we've done to make sure that happens is we've spent millions and millions of dollars hardening election infrastructure, working with 50 secretaries of state on cybersecurity, and we've also sent very strong messages to all these countries. With respect to Russia, we put so many sanctions on Russia there's almost nothing left to sanction."
CHUCK TODD: "So it's not working. "
O'BRIEN: "Look, these are foreign powers that are adverse to the United States. We are in a period of great power competition and look, Russia and China are on the other side. But what we've done is we've pushed back, unlike the last administration."
I doubt Putin expected this, nor did he want this. He did not expect the West to say, “Enough is enough!” He envisioned his superpower Russia holding the economic upper hand over the West, while his military forced former Soviet republics back into the fold. Neither is happening, and Putin has to pretend that the Soviet Union was the strength of Russia—its very spirit and power. Russian military vehicles are even flying Soviet flags as they invade Ukraine.
The isolation? It’s good.
The lack of basic products from the West? That’s good too.
Suffering economic decline? Bread lines that were so ubiquitous in Soviet Russia? They’ll make Russians stronger.
And while Rothman is correct when he writes—with a certain amount of almost inappropriate glee—that the Russians are getting what they deserve and want with the return of the Soviet Union, I would remind him that thousands of them oppose Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and are willing to be tossed in jail for their protests. I would also remind him that the “nostalgia” for the Soviet Union is largely based in the crony capitalism and corruption that followed its fall, for which Putin bears a significant amount of responsibility.