The New Yorker Radio Hour - Stephen Kotkin: Don’t Blame the West for Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

It’s impossible to understand the destruction and death that Vladimir Putin is unleashing in Ukraine without understanding his most basic conviction: that the breakup of the Soviet empire was a catastrophe from which Russia has yet to recover. Some experts, including John Mearsheimer, have blamed NATO expansion for the invasion of Ukraine, arguing that it has provoked Vladimir Putin to defend his sphere of influence. Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University, and a research scholar at the Hoover Institution, respectfully disagrees. Putin’s aggression is “not some kind of deviation from the historical pattern,” he tells David Remnick. Russia in the nineteenth century looked much as it does today, he says. “It had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West.” Kotkin describes how and why the Putin regime has evolved toward despotism, and he speculates that the strategic blunders in invading Ukraine likely resulted from the biases of authoritarian rulers like Putin, and the lack of good information available to them. Kotkin is the author of an authoritative biography of Joseph Stalin, two volumes of which have been published; a third is in the making. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's impossible to understand the destruction and slaughter that Vladimir Putin is unleashing in Ukraine without understanding his most basic conviction, that the breakup of the Soviet Empire was a catastrophe that Russia has yet to recover from. No one I know understands this history more intimately than Steve. Stephen Kotkin. Kotkin is a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University, and he's a research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He's written two volumes so far on the life of Stalin, with one more to come, as well as books on the Soviet Union in its last

years. We've been hearing from voices, both from the past and the present, telling us that the reason for what has happened is, as George Kennan said, the great blunder of eastward expansion of NATO. A modern realist historian like John Mearsheimer tells us that a great deal of the blame for what we're witnessing now must go to the United States. So I thought we'd begin by your analysis of that argument. I have only the greatest respect for George Kennan, whom I knew.

John Mearsheimer is a giant of a scholar, but I respectfully disagree. The problem with their argument is that it assumes that had NATO not expanded, Russia wouldn't be exactly the same or very likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before NATO existed in the 19th century, Russia looked like this. It had an autocrat, it had repression, it had militarism, it had suspicion of foreigners, the West. This is a Russia we know, and it's not a Russia that arrived yesterday or arrived in the 1990s. It's not a response to actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today. I would even go farther. I would say that NATO expansion

has put us in a better place to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we're seeing again today. George Cannon was the greatest Russia expert who ever lived, but I just don't think blaming the West is the right analysis for where we are today. When you talk about the internal dynamics of Russia historically, it reminds me of a piece that you wrote and was published in foreign affairs six years ago, and it began like this. For half a millennium, Russian foreign policy has been characterized by soaring ambitions that have exceeded the country's capabilities, beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of 50 square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the

earth's landmass. And you go on to describe three fleeting moments of remarkable Russian ascendancy during Peter the Great, and then Alexander I first victory over Napoleon, and then, of course, Stalin's victory over Adolf Hitler. And then say these high water marks aside, Russia has almost always been a relatively weak, great power. So if you could expand on that and talk about how the internal dynamics of Russia have gone on to describe it both historically and in the present day under Putin, that would be, I think, very helpful. So with Russia, what you've got is a remarkable civilization. You know it. You know it in the arts, in music, in literature, in dance, in film, in science. It's just a deep, profound, remarkable place, a whole civilization more than just a

country. Its problem has always been not that sense of self, not that sense of identity, but the fact that it's in a struggle to live up to this aspiration that it has for itself, which it can't because the West has always been more powerful. Russia is a great power, but not the great power, except for those few moments in history that you just enumerated. And so in trying to match the West, or at least manage the differential between Russia and the West, they resort to coercion.

They use a very heavy state-centric approach to try to beat the country forward and upwards. And that works for a time ostensibly. Very superficially it works. And Russia has a spurred of economic growth and it builds up its military. And then, of course, it hits a wall. It then has a period, a long period of stagnation where the problem gets worse. The worst part of this dynamic in Russian history is the conflation of the Russian state with some personal ruler. So instead of getting the strong state that they want to manage the Gulf with the West, they instead get a personalist regime. They get a dictatorship, which usually becomes a despotism.

So Putin is what he is. He's ruling in Russia and he's got these circumstances, almost a syndrome where geopolitics is trying to make up for a power differential that it can't make up for. Well, let's describe Putin and Putinism. What kind of regime is it? It's not exactly the same as Stalinism. It's certainly not the same as Xi Jinping or the regime in Iran. What are its special characteristics? And why would those special characteristics lead it to want to invade,

or why would Putin want to invade Ukraine, which seems, at least from this distance, singularly stupid? Yes. Well, war usually is a miscalculation. It's based upon assumptions that don't pan out, things that you believe to be true or want it to be true. But let's back up for a second. So of course, this isn't the same regime as Stalin. Of course, there's been tremendous change.

The shock is that so much has changed, and yet we're seeing this pattern that they can't really escape from, where you have an autocrat or even now a despot, making decisions completely by himself. Does he get input from others? Perhaps do they bring him information he doesn't want to hear? That seems unlikely. Does he think he knows better than everybody else? That seems highly likely. So he believed it seems that Ukraine was not a real country.

He believed that the Ukrainian people were not a real people, that they were one people with the Russians. He believed that the Ukrainian government was a pushover. He believed what he was likely told or wanted to believe about his own military, that it had been modernized to the point where it could organize not a military invasion, but a lightning coup to take Kiev in one, two, four, five days, and either install a puppet government or force the current government and president to sign some paperwork. One other example we might allude to is what happened in Afghanistan in 1979. Very, very similar situation in some ways. The Soviet Union did not invade Afghanistan. It did a coup in Afghanistan. It sent special forces into the capital of Kabul.

It murdered the Afghan leadership. And it installed a puppet, Babrak Karmal. But of course, they decided they might need some security. in Afghanistan for the new regime. And so they sent in all sorts of regiments, army regiments, to provide security. And they ended up with an insurgency against their rule, and they ended up with a 10-year war that they lost. And so we have here the assumption that it could be a successful version of that, and it

wasn't. And it turned out the Ukrainian people are brave. and they're willing to resist and die for their country. And it turned out that the television president, Zelensky, who had a 25% approval rating before the war, which was fully deserved because he couldn't govern. Now he has a 91% approval rating. But the biggest surprise, of course, was the West. All the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline,

it's a multipolar world, the rise of China, et cetera, et cetera. All of that turned out to be bunk. The courage of the Ukrainian people and the bravery and smarts of the Ukrainian government and its president Zelenskyy galvanized the West to remember who it was. I'm talking with historian Stephen Kotkin. More in a moment. Let's discuss the nature of the regime, because it seems me that the Putin regime changed somewhat. What actually is the nature of the regime and the people

who are loyal to it and the people who are important in it? So it's a military police dictatorship. In addition, has a brilliant coterie of people who run macroeconomics. And so, for example, your central bank, your finance ministry, are all on the highest professional level. And that's why Russia had this fortress, this macroeconomic fortress, these foreign currency reserves, the rainy day fund, reasonable inflation. For the macroeconomic stability, for the economic growth, you sort of need decent relations with the West. But for the military security part of the regime, which is the dominant part, the West,

the West is your enemy. The West is trying to undermine you. It's trying to overthrow your regime in some type of so-called color revolution. And so what happens? The balance of those groups shifted more in favor of the military security. Let's call it the thuggish part of the regime. And of course, that's where Putin himself comes from. And so the regime became more and more corrupt. less and less sophisticated, less and less trustworthy, less and less popular, it hollowed out. But that's what happens with dictatorships. Once again, they hollow themselves out. But such a regime, it seems to me would care above all about wealth, about the high life, about power.

Why would they care about Ukraine? It's not clear that they do. We're talking about one person here. So this is the thing about authoritarian regimes. They're terrible at everything. They can't feed their people. They can't provide security for their people. They can't educate their people.

But they only have to be good at one thing to survive. The suppression of alternatives. If they can force all opposition into exile or prison, They can survive no matter how incompetent, no matter how corrupt, no matter how terrible they are. If money just gushes out of the ground in the form of hydrocarbons or diamonds or other minerals, the oppressors can emancipate themselves from the oppressed. The oppressors can say, we don't need you. We don't need your taxes.

We don't need you to vote. We don't rely on you for anything because we have all. oil and gas, palladium and titanium, and fill in the blank, all the minerals that they have that they extract, which is all just cash flow. Now, the West has decided, for obvious reasons, not only not to go to war with Russia, but not to have a no-fly zone for all the reasons we know. And the greatest exertion it showed is in economic sanctions, which in fact have proved to be more comprehensive and more powerful than maybe people that had anticipated some weeks ago

But in the scheme that you're sketching out, it seems to me that at least for a good while, the people these are most aimed at will be able to absorb sanctions. So do you think I'm wrong? Yes, the financial sanctions are very impressive, but they'll take a while to affect the calculus of those people around Putin and Putin himself. the biggest sanctions and the most important sanctions are always technology transfer, right? It's always starving them of the high tech. So if you deny them over time through the Commerce Department, American-made software and American-made equipment in products, you can hurt this regime and create a technology desert.

And the Chinese cannot come in and substitute because they need that same technology that we're denying to the Russians. Yeah, but in the meantime, as we saw in Grosney in 99, 2000, as we saw in Aleppo, Russia is perfectly willing, if precision doesn't work, they're perfectly happy to use decimation. And that is what we're seeing in Kharkiv. We've seen it in other parts of Ukraine, and to my mind, it's only just begun, potentially. Russia has a lot of weapons that they haven't used yet. But there are a couple of factors here.

First of all, Ukraine is winning this war only on Twitter. On the battlefield, they're not winning this war. Russia is advancing very well. What's failed was the attempt to take Kiev in a lightning advance. But otherwise, their war is unfolding well. Moreover, the largest and most important consideration is that Russia cannot successfully occupy Ukraine. They do not have the scale of forces.

They do not have the number of administrators, and they do not have the cooperation of the population. They don't even have a quizzling yet. You know, we're waiting for Victor Yanukovych to reappear. Victor Yanukovych was the duly elected president in 2010 in free and fair elections, who was unbelievably corrupt and was chased out of power by protests, and he fled to Russia, and Yanukovych is still in Russia.

But let's think about him. He's a psychologically unimpressive character. He was incompetent. Could he actually have the willpower? Would he even agree to run Ukraine on behalf of Russia? And if not him, who else? and moreover, think about all those Ukrainians who would continue to resist. And if you're an administrator or a military officer in occupied Ukraine and you order a cup of tea,

you're going to drink that cup of tea? You want to turn the ignition on in your car? You're going to turn that ignition on? You're going to turn the light switch on in your office? And all it takes is a handful of them being assassinated to unsettle. the whole occupation. Finally, you've been very quick to give credit where credit is due to the Biden administration for reading out its intelligence about the coming invasion, for sanctions,

and for a kind of mature response to what's happening. What, if anything, have they gotten wrong in this? They've done much better than we anticipated based upon what we saw in Afghanistan withdrawal, in the Ocas rollout, the rollout of the deal to sell nuclear submarines to the Australians, but they've learned from their mistakes. That's the thing about the United States and the West. We have corrective mechanisms. We have a political system that punishes mistakes.

We have strong institutions. We have powerful and free media. And so administrations that perform badly can learn and get better, which is not the case in Russia. And it's an advantage we can't forget. The problem now, David, is not that the Biden administration made mistakes. It's that it's really hard to figure out how to de-escalate. We keep raising the stakes with more and more sanctions and cancellations

because that's where the pressure is on our side to, quote, do something because the Ukrainians are dying on television every day. But the more you corner, the more there's nothing to lose, for Putin, the more he can raise the stakes. We need a de-escalation from the maximalist spiral, and we need a little bit of luck and fortune here, perhaps in Moscow, perhaps in Helsinki, or Jerusalem, perhaps in Beijing, but certainly in Kiev. Steve Kotkin, I'm very grateful to you. Thank you. Thank you. Stephen Kotkin is a professor of history and International Affairs at Princeton University. This was an edited version of my conversation with him,

and you can read much more and also watch the video at New Yorker.com. And for more context on the invasion of Ukraine, you might want to hear my conversation with reporters Masha Gessen and Joshua Yaffe, who shed light on everything that they've seen on the ground. That's on a recent episode of our podcast. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Ave Carrillo, Brito Green,

Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Alison McAdam, Harrison-McAdam, Harrison-Keithline, and Meng Faye Chen, and guidance from Emily Boutin. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.