Georgia and the Dangers of Putinism

I was watching Katyn and I had Georgia on my mind.

The Katyn Forest massacre remains one of the most notorious crimes of the twentieth century. In the spring of 1940, the Soviet security forces murdered and buried in mass graves some 15,000 Polish officers taken prisoners of war after the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, in accordance with the secret protocols of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Of itself, the mass killing of Polish officers hardly stands out on the blood-soaked canvas of the last century’s history; after all, there have been hundreds of Katyn massacres committed during the decades of the communist reign, and hundreds of other mass graves lie throughout the forests and the tundra from Belarus to the Baring Strait. What made Katyn exceptional is the controversy the case attracted ever since the Wehrmacht found and exhumed the bodies in 1943, and the impact the massacre has had on international relations, including, arguably, the genesis of the Cold War.

Katyn is a somber and powerful cinematic memorial to those who were murdered and those who were left behind, made by Andrzej Wajda, the greatest living Polish film director. Wajda’s father was one of the officers murdered by the Soviet NKVD, and his family had to live for decades with the official lie that he and 14,700 others were really murdered by the Germans. Wajda’s film was nominated for the Best Foreign Movie Oscar earlier this year, eventually losing to Austria’s Counterfeiters, a more traditional take on World War Two and survival in concentration camps.

Watching Katyn on DVD the other night I was thinking about my great-grandfather, a Major in the Polish Army who was one of the lucky ones allowed to exit the Soviet Union with General Anders, and who had then fought the length of the Italian Peninsula with the II Polish Army Corp, including at Monte Cassino, the Stalingrad of the Western front.

But mostly my thoughts turned to Georgia. Once you get over the irony of being lectured that the right to ethnic self-determination trumps national sovereignty and territorial integrity by someone who had despoiled Chechnya, you might be forgiven for thinking rather melodramatically that something more than people died on the streets of Gori. Perhaps it was the great geopolitical hope of the past two decades that Russia would turn out to be a normal country, like most other post-communist states. That hope was arguably dying the death of thousand cuts over the years, becoming less credible with every new authoritarian measure at home and every next saber rattling abroad. But invading a sovereign democratic neighbor must surely count as the Rubicon of sorts.

Soon on the heels of the Georgian incursion came the nuclear blackmail delivered to Poland by a middling military apparatchik. There is both more and less than it seems to the threat that Poland risks a nuclear attack as a consequence of signing onto America’s missile shield program. More, because we have not heard such strong rhetoric coming out of Moscow in quite some time; less, because the Russian words rather than a threat were a re-statement of the Cold War doctrine that in an event of nuclear war with the United States, America’s allies hosting the U.S. military installations would become targets as much as the American mainland. Arguably, it is a sign of progress of sorts that over the course of two decades Poland went from being targeted by the American nuclear missiles to being targeted by the Russian ones.

Putting aside an occasional cyber-attack or turning off the natural gas tap, Russia’s offensive against former satellites has in the past been one of words. Fueled by a sense of humiliation and bounties of a resource boom, Putin has encouraged and overseen the blossoming of a chauvinistic and jingoistic climate of opinion that represents a curious mélange of communist and tsarist themes.

It is once again respectable in the Russian media to return to the old lie that it was the Nazis, not the communists, who were responsible for the Katyn massacre. That, despite the fact that Gorbachev himself finally acknowledged in 1990 the Soviet responsibility, and that Yeltsin presented the Polish president Lech Walesa in 1992 with the Katyn “smoking gun,” a copy of the Beria’s official order, signed by Stalin and other members of the Politbiuro, ordering the murder of the Polish officers. Historians would kill for a similar document bearing Hitler’s signature and sealing the fate of the European Jewry.

As the Hoover Institution’s Paul Gregory and Maciej Siekierski wrote, “For Putin, striving to resurrect Russian patriotism, the symbolism of Katyn is most unwelcome. Besides tainting Soviet wartime heroism, a frank discussion of the years of Nazi-Soviet collaboration and Stalin’s own imperial ambitions represents an inconvenient truth that the leaders of the new Russia — post-Soviet but never de-Sovietized — would prefer to leave buried.”

Inconvenient it might be, but it is also largely irrelevant to Russia’s new-found determination to reassert itself. Greatness is a relative value, and has to be achieved in relation to and at the expense of others. Through the centuries of Russia’s rise these others included the Tatar hordes, Poland, Sweden, France, Germany and (in the end unsuccessfully) the United States; the latter contest with an extra geopolitical piquancy through the admixture of messianic communism to the stock-standard imperialist policies. Now, following a brief period of history interrupted, the chase is back on, spurred on additionally perhaps by the realization that, demographically speaking, time is not on Russia’s side.

George W Bush, in one of the greatest misjudgments of his political life, had once said that he “looked [Putin] in the eye [and] found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.” The wishful thinking can perhaps be forgiven; we believe what we want to believe. This was, after all, June of 2001; the tail end of the “long 90s,” the decade of seemingly the new beginnings and exuberant hopes about a better world and a better future. Peering into Putin’s steel-cold eyes, President Bush believed he “was able to get a sense of [Putin’s] soul.” When I look into Putin’s eyes I have a feeling like I’m being made love to by a glacier.

Putin said, only three years ago, that the collapse of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.” Au contraire, the existence of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. With a possible caveat regarding the Soviet role in the defeat of Hitler, anyone who believes otherwise is morally and intellectually stunted.

Yet, for all his apprenticeship at the KGB, the sword and the shield of the communist revolution, Putin does not care about the Soviet Union or communism as such. He cares about power and Russia. The Soviet experience is important only in as much as it represents the apogee of Russian power in the world. But Putin could just as well be extolling the golden age of Tsar Alexander I or Peter the Great.

It is the latter which in many ways is the better guide for Putin than Stalin, currently being rehabilitated in Russian school textbooks and in popular media. To talk about the centuries old struggle for Russia’s soul is a historical misnomer. The struggle has always been about the means, not the ends, pitting the traditionalists, who fervently believed that Russia already has all the answers in the quest for national greatness, against the Westernisers. The latter, despite their name, never entertained dreams of making their country a part of the great Western family of nations. Leaders like Peter the Great merely wanted to borrow the Western hardware (science, technology, methods of production), not in order to run the imported Western software (ideas, philosophies, freedoms), but to make sure that the Russian software (imperialism, authoritarianism, militarism) runs more efficiently and effectively. To borrow Arthur Koestler’s description of Nazism, the Westernisers’ Russia was to be skyscraper sitting on a volcano. Putin is merely the latest legatee of this tradition. If communism was, according to Lenin, Soviet power plus electrification; Putinism is Tsardom with nukes. Question remains how far Vladimir the Great decides to push it.