Angry Planet - Russia and the West's Love/Hate History

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

Relations between Russia and the western world are complicated. In the grand scheme of things, America is but a recent addition to a long simmering rivalry that runs back a thousand years. Putin and Ukraine? Well, that’s just the latest dust up in a very long history.So let’s talk about it.Here with us today to suss all this out is Michael Hirsh. Hirsh is a senior correspondent at Foreign Policy and the author of the excellent piece there, Putin’s Thousand-Year War.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world of their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Relations between Russia and the Western world are complicated. In the grand scheme of things, America is but a recent addition to a long-simmering rivalry that runs back a thousand years. Putin and Ukraine? Well, that's just the latest dust-up in a very long history. So, let's talk about it. Here with us today, to suss out all of this, is Michael Hirsch. He's a senior correspondent at Foreign Policy and the author of an excellent piece, Putin's Thousand-Year War.

Thank you so much for joining us. Happy to be here. I just want to say first about the piece is just you provide a context that I think is really missing from the discussion in a lot of the places. So thanks just for writing it. Oh, well, thank you for highlighting it. I appreciate it. I do think it's a long bit of history that needs to be discussed. Let's start with a very basic question.

where does the West end and Russia begin? Is Russia not at times part of the West? Well, that really goes to the heart of the issue, I think, in a lot of ways, because oddly enough, Russia of all the major countries in the world is one that still can't quite figure out what its borders are. It's really remarkable to think so. Imagine we haven't yet figured out whether we really wanted Texas to be part of the United States or we were still debate. it, that's like where they are. And that's part of what's at issue right now is that the Russians, the Russian state, with a couple of brief exceptions, the Horenzky democracy right after the revolution of 1917, and then the brief period with Boris Yeltsin right after the Cold War,

with those exceptions, Russia has always been an empire that has been constantly trying to expand westward. And at the same time, as you alluded to, there's always been this identity crisis. It's this vast land that straddles Asia and Europe. It was conquered and occupied by the Mongols for hundreds of years and has always had this ongoing flirtation, both Europe and with Asia or its Asian identity. And I think in a very real sense, that's part of what's at play now in at least Vladimir Putin's mind. It was, okay, we were rolled back after the Cold War, seriously rolled back NATO encroaching on our borders. It's now time to reestablish the Russian. Russian Imperium of the glorious past.

Central to your piece, and I think central to what's going on, what's playing out right now, is this idea of Uro-Asianism, if I'm saying that correctly. Can you explain what exactly that means? Yeah, this is an ideology or philosophy that goes back more than 100 years, and basically is the idea that Russia should be a Eurasian Empire. And to go back to the previous answer, straddling both Europe and Asia, and that should be a kind of bulwark against the Western values. And this is a fight that goes back to the Enlightenment, to this goes back to the idea that rather than embracing Western-style liberal democracy, Russia should stand up for these old SARS values. There was a dictum that was created in the early 1900, I'm sorry, the early 19th century by the education advisor at Tsar Nicholas I'm which was orthodoxy autocracy and nationalism. It was specifically designed as an answer to the French motto, liberty, equality, and fraternity of the French Revolution. So there's very much this separate identity

that the Eurasianist philosophy seeks to unfold and to promote. And all the evidence is based on the kinds of things Putin has said over the years that he's very much influenced by this, that he is very profoundly a Eurasianist. Well, I just have a follow-up, sorry, specifically on Eurasianism. Is this why I feel like Alexander Dugan is somebody that falls in and out of fashion in Western circles as far as being talked about being a central part of like the ideology behind all of this. Do you hear some people say that this guy is like he's the guy that whispers in Putin's ear.

He's a gray vizier. He's this, that, and the other. And then for a few years, it'll be like, well, he's a joke. No one really listens to Alexander Dugan. And now I'm hearing again Alexander Dugan's name come up and this idea of Eurasianism and neo-Eurasianism come up again. What do you think? What do you make of Dugan? Do you think he has any part in this?

Or is he, you know, look, what's the deal? I think that he has never been close to Putin. And you're right, he has been in and out of fashion. There was a period when he was thought to be a Kremlin advisor and then he was cast out. It's not just Dugan. Dugan is just one of the names. And some of these names go back 200 years. They're long dead.

Yvonne, for example, who was as mystical philosopher of Eurasianism of a century ago. Difficult to gauge how much Putin is actually an intellectual who, has absorbed, read and studied the writings of many of these people or versus someone who is just picking it up, willy-nilly, which I tend to think is the case. I don't think that Putin is some sort of an intellectual or ideologist in his own right. I think he's just, if you look at particularly that more than 5,000 word essay that he published in July of last year, which kind of really sums up a lot of these views, I think it's just bits and pieces from Alexander Dugan, Iliin, and others. So I don't think there's really any coherent philosophy beyond his being a very fervent Russian nationalist

who believes that Russia and its destiny is to be a Eurasian empire. And his destiny, as Russia's leader, is to restore that. I think that it really comes down to that pretty simply. One thing that you also mentioned was part of the tripartite slogan is autocracy, which is very hard for people in the West to imagine as a good thing. Do you think that it's built into the Russian psyche that there should be a czar and a good czar and that Putin fits into that too? I think that we're learning about this invasion, which is still very surprising in many respects, is just how different the Russian mindset is from ours.

Russia is a land that has suffered disastrous invasions from Napoleon's in the early 19th century to the catastrophic invasion of Nazi Germany. And this is a trauma that they live with, a kind of trauma that we don't really understand. And I think that in the Russian mind, it helps to justify the idea that we need to be an empire. We need, again, strategic depth. We need to create these buffer zones, including territories like Ukraine, which they consider just a territory. And the other aspect of that is that Russia continues to be a place made up of many sort of ethnic groups and nationalities, some of which have even adopted their own desire for self-determination along the lines of what Ukraine, you know, has done since the end of the Cold War, at least. And, you know, there are a sense among some scholars, for example, Peter Yeltsov of National Defense University, that if Russia were truly to become a democracy, it would split apart.

There's too much of a yearning for self-determination among these many subgroups. So there's this historical sense in which Russia may be, at least, quay Russia, as the Russian Federation, as it's now presently constituted, may be doomed to autocracy. We don't know, but all I can say is if you look at the polls up until at least this invasion, Putin continued to be very popular. And this was through all these periods when he was clearly killing off his opponents, like Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered literally within the shadow of the Kremlin several years ago. I don't know, figure it out. What does that mean? If you have someone like Putin who is becoming an autocrat and indeed almost a totalitarian, particularly in the last few weeks, And he has the support of the Russian people, then I think we have to ask ourselves, maybe that's what the Russian people want.

Well, I would say that I think there's two points I would make here. One is that I think some people would say those polls are juiced, right? They are not perhaps accurate. But I would also say that as the Russian election was, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly, as the Russian election was. But on the other hand, and we've had guests on the show that have made this point in the past, AP Bureau Chief in Russia. somewhere. I can't remember her name, wrote an excellent book called Putin's country. But the Western conception of Russia often stops at the Ural Mountains, right? Like, we don't think about that

vast tract of land filled with people beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg. And how very different the culture is in a very large country, right? Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm we don't. And you're absolutely right. It's difficult to say what the real sentiments might be, particularly in those places out there that are probably still unpoled. But at the same time, we have to note the absence of any real revolutionary fervor, at least up until now. And while some of these liberal opponents have been killed off, they're not perhaps quite as liberal as we in the West sometimes see. Even Nemtsov, who was, perhaps the dominant opponent to Putin, came out in favor of a constitutional. monarchy in one point for Russia. So it's a very different mindset, I think. And that's not to say there aren't many liberals and liberal-leaning people inside Russia. It's just that at least for the present,

they don't seem to be the majority. We'll have to see what happens in coming weeks. Obviously, in a place like Russia, you can't rule out the possibility of revolution, even as we have to look at Vladimir Putin as only the latest Tsar. So will he suffer the fate of Tsar Nicholas the second? Who knows? But right now, we don't see that happening. Is there, do you think, a natural antipathy between Russia and the West, that it's just there. It's baked in. Yeah, I think that we have to wrap our minds around that, that is we in the West, at long last. Going back to Woodrow Wilson after World War I, Wilson thought of the Russians as a fundamentally democratic and said so even after the 1917 revolution. And then moving fast forward up until the

post-cold War period when you had many senior U.S. officials, I can remember a particular Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot, who himself is a Russia expert. He actually translated Khrushchev's memoirs, and I used to speak to him quite often when I was with Newsweek magazine, was saying it's just a matter of time before the Russian democracy really blossoms. There was a sense, and this is somewhat analogous to the way that we would be China as well, there was a sense that it was only a matter of time before they were going to sign on, right, to the liberal democratic capitalist model. And I think it's really time to tell ourselves, no, that's not going to happen. And it's certainly not going to happen anytime soon.

And this is not going to be exactly like the Cold War. It's a different kind of struggle, but it is going to be a long-term struggle. It's going to be, I think, a battle between Western values and a nation-state slash empire, if you will, that views the world in a very different way. Even if Putin is ousted, frankly, whoever is likely to take his place is probably going to be a Eurasianist as well, to some degree.

All of the people around him see things in the same way. And I think we just have to be realistic at long last and say to ourselves, okay, this isn't going away, no matter what happens in Ukraine. Yeah, it's hard for me personally to even think of. What's that? I said it's grim. It's unpleasant to have to think that way, but sometimes you have to confront rude realities.

And I think that for the United States, it's very hard because we, of course, think that we're the best, or our system is the best, that everyone should be our kind of democracy as well as that's currently working out. But we also had this image at the end of the Soviet Union that everyone, wanted jeans, right? That you would like bring blue jeans to Moscow and you could sell them and everyone wanted them and not. It wasn't that they didn't like rock and roll. It was they were just behind us. But they also did, they did want the jeans though. You did want the jeans, right? And salami. I have learned a lot about salami recently. Yeah. And Burger King, which, you know, is insisting that it's going to keep its outlets there in Russia right now. Yeah, I know, but it seems to me that we sort of, in a too facile way, we kind of mapped,

we extrapolated from that desire for jeans and for rock and roll, pussy riot, all of that, and just thought, okay, well, it's just a matter of time until it become like us. But it seems like it's very possible. And of course, we also see this in authoritarian China to want and to get the jeans and the rock and roll and to prefer a very different system of government and a different culture. And I think that we need to confront that. This whole concept of the civilization state that it's not just Russia. It's also China.

It's India under Modi as well, which is becoming increasing authoritarian. I think we have to reconcile ourselves to the idea that, yeah, there is a separate West that embraces the Enlightenment that's had its own separate history. But, you know, not everyone's going to become like us. I feel like I'm the grim reaper here. I don't know. Oh, this is a down note show. Trust me. This is this is typical for us. You're good. I try. Believe me, I do look for the optimistic. I do, I do try to be as positive as I can. But I think at this juncture, it's hard to do so. No, I think I agree with that. And I think that there's a, we've got so much blinding optimism in America specifically that I think it's really good to confront some of this stuff head on and have

tough conversations and like really try to understand the long history of a country that is not our own and really put some context around this stuff. And I think when you have a what I would call, I guess, a rising imperial power, maybe rising is the wrong word, an imperial power that's tried to reclaim its, it's, it's past in some way that is killing civilians and losing its own soldiers at the rate that it is in Ukraine. I think like these are the kind of conversations we need to have. And it's a grim topic. Well, on that note, I would like to strike one, say, say a couple positive things. One, Russia is not a great empire. Okay. It's the 11th largest economy in the world. It's shrunk to a size approximately of Spain in economic terms.

And the other thing that we've seen, particularly in the last few weeks, is a sort of reaffirmation of the West and Western values to a remarkable degree that we haven't seen really since the end of the Cold War. And I think in the international system as a whole, the international community, which is such an ill-defined thing, has come together with the exception of a couple countries that are still aligned with Russia like India to condemn this aggression and to isolate Russia economically in a way that has never been done before to any country. The Iran sanctions, for example, are child's play compared to what we are seeing against the Russian economy right now. So I think that's a pretty positive sign.

There's a large civilization of our own out there that we are defending. People are stepping up in a way that we haven't seen. You're even seeing glimmers of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, which perhaps is the most amazing thing of all. So there are some positive things to come out of it. I was wondering about you had mentioned in your piece that sometimes Russia makes an effort to head west and they try to reform, but they seem to get snapped. back. And of course, I guess after the end of the Cold War, it's another period like that.

But could you talk a little bit about, let's say, Peter the Great and these efforts to leap West? Yeah. Peter the Great, of course, was a great enthusiast for the West, Western values. You know, he imposed a beard tax, actually, and ordered his boyers or lords to shave themselves so they could look like Europeans. There's a lot of interbreeding at that time and afterwards with European aristocracy and royalty. And he sought to modernize Russia's military and economy by emulating the West. And Catherine the Great, his descendant at least by marriage, she was Prussian-born, but she also sought to bring the Russian state toward the West. excuse me, she was a great fan of Dieterot, the French Enlightenment philosopher and

considered Voltaire to be her hero. And during the early years of her reign, was quite an enthusiast for parliamentary reforms. But she got a lot of pushback from Russian nobles. And she ended up, of course, being a great conqueror herself of Western lands. And so by the same token, fast-forwarding ahead hundreds of years, there was right after the Cold War, a lot of enthusiasm for Western-style economic reforms. They called it shock therapy at the time. Let's open up and liberalize our economy. But it always seemed to fall on hard times.

Most recent period, right after the Cold War, for example, shock therapy fibinization turned into what the Russians riley called grabification. And most of the wealth of the former state-owned, the communist enterprises, fell into the hands of the oligarchs. And one of the historical ironies is that Vladimir Putin, who then was just this obscure deputy, former deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, rose to power really decrying the power of the oligarchs.

And he began to take them out. And of course, later on, he installed his own oligarchs, mostly his former KGB pals. But the fact is, westernizing reforms to get back to the point of what you were asking, have often seemed to backfire in Russian politics. And that goes all the way back to Peter the Great. Peter the Great's reform is today, even though he's revered in this as this, he's this lionized figure in Russian history. What he did in terms of turning toward the West is seen in Vladimir Putin's Russia today as a fifth column to use one of Putin's favorite terms. Let's talk about Putin now, the person that's at the center of this current war. If Putin was telling the story of Russian history, how do you think it would go? I know you've teased on it and the answer. that last question. Yeah, yeah. I think it would be about what he calls the West anti-Russia

Pratt, and he does tend to focus on the Cold War. But remember, Putin is no communist. He worked for the KGB, but particularly in his most recent speech, the one he delivered three days before the invasion. He made a point of saying, look, Stalin and Lenin were wrong, particularly vis-a-Ukraine. And they made a lot of mistakes during the Soviet period. This is more about Russian national power. But for Poo, he's 69 years old, this also is about what's happened since he came into power 20 years ago and the constant encroachment as he sees it of NATO moving westward. And I think that a key moment for him was the Bucharest memorandum of 2008, which essentially said that Ukraine and Georgia, you would someday join NATO without laying out any kind of specific plant.

Of course, what we had after that was his incursion into Georgia, which he accomplished in only a few days, but occupied a couple of so-called separat provinces. And then Ukraine has been a borne his side. And, of course, the Maidan revolution of almost a decade ago was really key in making him realize that he might not be able to wrestle this country to the ground in the same way he has, say, Belarus, that they actually have these Western-leaning yearnings. And what we've seen then has really been the consequence of that. So I think that he sees this both as part of this

grand Eurasian project of reestablishing Russia's empire, Russian glory, Russian greatness, going back to the Tsars. But at the same time, I think he sees it as a more immediate response to the injustices of the United States and the Western European nations, in particular NATO, in pushing up against what he sees as rightfully Russia's border is Russia's territorial zone, Russia's sphere of influence. And I think it comes down at a very personal level for him to a sense of humiliation. Why are they humiliating us? How dare they humiliate us? We are, we are Russia. We are a great power. You see this. this theme come out in many of his speeches. And I think that's one of the reasons also he's been

popular up until now because a lot of Russians have shared that sense of injustice after the Cold War. So you write in the piece to piggyback off of that, that Putin may see this current conflict as also a continuation of World War II. How does that make sense? Well, it is bizarre. It's mind jarring. We were all trying to get our heads around it. Okay, Vladimir Zelensky is Jewish, the president of Ukraine. So how does this add up to denazifying Ukraine? Again, it goes back to history. A substantial portion of the Ukrainian population at the outset of World War II did ally with the Nazis. There were a lot of fascists, including a couple of the national heroes of Ukraine presently, whose statues you can see on the streets of Kiev and other major cities. were allied with the Nazis and were actually anti-Semitic in very real ways.

There are a lot of pogroms in Ukraine, obviously most notoriously, Bobignar, which you recall was the memorial was bombed in the very early days of the invasion, where more than 30,000 Jews were killed by Ukrainian fascists and Nazis. So I think even though Ukraine has obviously changed so dramatically since then, Putin sees this as a continuation of the Russian victory. And recall that Putin is someone who has portrayed in his speeches in recent years the victory in World War II as a Russian one. He's actually gradually eliminated the Allies entirely, the United States entirely from that victory. And that is the last great, glorious Russian recall that, right? I haven't had any

big wins since then. I don't want to really want to count Syria. That's not much of a win. But that was their great struggle against Hitler, against the Nazis. Many Russians identify with that. Putin's own father fought in World War II. He carries his picture every year when they have this annual parade to commemorate the victory. And I think for him, he to some extent really sees it that way. He sees himself as not only enfolding Ukraine into the Russian sphere of influence, but purging it, to use that terrible word, we just heard.

him say the other day, purging it of these fascist elements, as he still says. I think it's a delusional point of view, but I think that he probably really, really believes that it's true. I also, I always appreciate an article that mentions Vladislav Sarkov, which is another kind of one of these figures, kind of like Alexander Dugan that floats in and out of Russia watchers consciousness. Can you tell the audience who he is, why he's important, and how kind of his role in shaping what I would say is Russia's modern self-conception. Well, he's, again, one of these figures is difficult to say how much influence he's had. He's been seen as the Kremlin's ideologists in the past, perhaps not so much in recent years.

He's become a commentator. But if you look at some of his writings and what we know about his relationship, personal relationship with Putin, And it's almost as if he's been Putin's alter ego. And one of the things I quote in the piece that I think was really telling is that after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Sarkov wrote that this was finally a break with the West. This was Russia's way of saying, we are not going to be embracing Western civilization any longer. We are going to be going off on our own. And we know that we might have to suffer from geopolitical isolation.

for at least the next hundred years. This is what he wrote at the time. And to me, that suggested that it was like Putin and his circle were preparing for this moment, perhaps for longer than any of us realized. I don't think that Putin quite thought this was going to be this bad in terms of the economic isolation. But I think they were preparing themselves for the idea, and this is what Serkov laid out, that this was going to be this long-term struggle between the West and Russia. And so Sarkoff has certainly given us a lot of, he's prefigured in many ways in his writings, what's happening now. He's extremely fascinating to me because he's this person that is extremely good at making you think that he's important and powerful when perhaps he is not.

Like Alexander Dugan and some of these others. They're all very good at that, you know. Yeah. And I would, and I would argue that like perhaps Russia has. in the past 20 years in Putin's Russia specifically, right, has made it, has done a very good job of making itself seem extremely powerful and scary. And I think we're finding out now that its military can't do things like fight at night or supplied soldiers with food. Yeah. Well, yeah, I don't want to finish on too much of a downer note.

But all of that is true, with the signal exception that he still commands a vast nuclear arsenal, that he's reminded us all too chillingly that could come into play in extreme circumstances. And he's got something honest that Hitler didn't have, frankly, and that worries me a little bit, not too much, but it does worry me a little bit. And you're right, everything you said about the weakness of his military being made manifest, but that kind of worries me even more somehow. So I don't know. Hopefully survive.

The last question I have is this would seem to make it impossible for the United States to pivot to Asia, or I guess to face off with China, as we've been planning to do now for three administrations. Does the United States really now face two powers and how, How does that make you feel? Well, I wrote about that recently, actually, before the invasion on the anniversary of Nixon's opening to China, which happened 50 years ago in February, and raising the question, is there something we can do to get around this the way Nixon did, which is the split Moscow from Beijing? And I think that actually the invasion may afford us that opportunity to some degree. I do think that Russia and China will remain aligned, but perhaps not as much as Putin wanted. Kishigin, even though he hates U.S. dominance as much as Putin does, his economy is much

more integrated into the global economy. China could not afford, for example, the kind of economic isolation that Russia is now undergoing. So I do think there may be a way to navigate that and perhaps to at least split China from Russia through by basically telling them, look, you really can't afford to have all of your companies banned from the European Union and the United States the way Russia now is. And it's going to be interesting to watch that. But I also think that, frankly, Beijing is looking at what happened to Russia and Ukraine and saying, boy, we really don't want that to happen to us in Taiwan. And I think that any sort of Taiwan invasion plans they had on the books are now being looked at anew. I've been told by the White House, they're coming out with

their national security strategy later this spring. That's been put off somewhat because of the invasion. They say that they still want to maintain the sort of Indo-Pacific focus, which is to say China, and I expect that they'll do that. But I think there's going to be a lot of new thinking about ways to create new divisions between Russia and China that we didn't have before. Putin, by putting himself beyond the pale the way he has, by really eliminating any future participation in the international system that he can't have it anymore, I think has created a new wedge between himself and China that wasn't there before. See, an upnote.

Yeah. You can call that an up note. I'll take it. I'll take it. Relatively speaking, yeah, that's about as up as to be right now. Try me next week. Michael Horace, your foreign policy. The piece is Putin's thousand-year war.

Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through this. Well, thanks so much, Matt, Jason. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.