Form: Quote Commentary

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/russia-great-forgetting/THE REEMERGENCE OF RUSSIAN TOTALITARIANISM AND LYING

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If fear was in the background, poverty was in the foreground. Leningrad was crumbling. The faint smell of sewage hung over the canals. Shop shelves were empty. Queues formed rapidly whenever there was a delivery of shoes or sausage. There were no interesting books in the bookstores, and there was nothing but stiff party jargon in the newspapers. Television was boring. You had to have special clout to get theater tickets. Toward the end of my stay, one of my friends asked if I would consider marrying his cousin in order to help him escape. “You’ll be saving someone’s life,” he told me.

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…the living memory of the USSR is now truly fading and the nature of the USSR—its peculiar awfulness, its criminality, its stupidity—is becoming harder and harder to explain. The sense of being surrounded by lies; the underlying anxiety that someone might be listening or reporting on you; the constant, screaming, inescapable propaganda; the sullenness of the crowds on the Metro; the memories of mass terror just below the surface; the useful idiots and the cynical sycophants who supported the whole thing, both in Russia and abroad; all of that is now absolutely impossible to convey.

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My concern is the revival, with amazing speed, of a belligerent Russian state, one led by men who were taught and trained by the Soviet state and are thus prepared to use a familiar blend of terror, deception, and military force to stay in power. One might argue, of course, that such men never really went away. But their level of aggression is rising just as our once formidable ability to counter them seems to have vanished altogether. Instead, we have trouble simply recognizing them for what they are.

This became patently clear in March 2014 just after the Ukrainian revolution, which saw the ouster of the Russian-aligned Victor Yanyukovich and the restoration of the country’s democratic constitution. On Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, “little green men,” as they later came to be called, suddenly appeared. Equipped with guns, wearing unmarked uniforms, and driving unmarked military vehicles, they began methodically taking over local government buildings and television stations. In almost every major city, local “politicians,” some of whom had previously been leaders of criminal gangs, seemed primed to welcome the little green men, almost as if they had been warned.

The Western reaction was one of confusion, amazement, consternation. What was happening? Was this a local uprising? A civil war? Were these unidentified men Russians from Russian? Were they Russians from Crimea?

In the quarter-century since the fall of Communism, we’ve forgotten what a cynical, unprincipled, authoritarian Russian regime looks like.

I knew exactly who they were: Russian special forces. I knew it because they looked, spoke, and acted exactly like the Soviet special forces—then known as the NKVD—who had entered Poland in 1939, the Baltic states in 1940, then all of Eastern Europe in 1945. Like their modern descendants, those Soviet interior ministry troops wore unmarked uniforms or sometimes Polish or Hungarian uniforms, even if they didn’t speak Polish or Hungarian. Like their modern descendants, they also claimed to be coming to the aid of local forces—oppressed minorities, local Communist parties—which in some cases hadn’t even existed until they arrived.

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There was nothing unusual about this in the Soviet era. During the whole of its existence, the USSR never invaded another country; no, it merely came to the aid of oppressed minorities or fraternal parties. But it never left without imposing—or, in Afghanistan, trying and failing to impose—its own totalitarian system. When the NKVD, later known as the KGB, crossed any border, it always arrested potential dissidents, took over the media, shut down civic organizations, nationalized companies, and created the fear and poverty I’d later see in Leningrad.

And this is exactly what Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, did after coming to the aid of the “oppressed Russian minority in Crimea” in 2014—though instead of nationalizing companies, the Russian occupiers stole them from Ukrainian owners and gave them to Russians. Time moves on.

Since the Crimean invasion, the Russians have advanced into eastern Ukraine using similar tactics. Adding a twist to the narrative, they have now entered the Syrian conflict too, in order to come to the aid of the fraternal Assad regime. Not only the United States but all of what used to be called “the West” has been flummoxed by these moves, even thrown into strategic disarray. And no wonder. In the quarter-century since the fall of Communism, we’ve forgotten what a cynical, unprincipled, authoritarian Russian regime looks like, especially one with an audacious global strategy and no qualms whatsoever about sacrificing human life. Let me say it again more clearly: Almost all of the men who currently rule Russia (and they are all men) were taught and trained by the KGB. Their teaching and training shows. Why would it not?

These tactics are not exactly the same as the ones Putin learned in the KGB in the 1970s and 1980s, but neither are they entirely different. In the past decade, for example, the Russian regime has reconstructed a state-run media machine far more sophisticated than anything the USSR ever invented and yet similarly blinkered. Although there are dozens of domestic news outlets, entertainment channels, and magazines, they all toe the same political line, with only a tiny number of exceptions. There is an appearance of variety but a unity of messages. Among them: The United States is a threat; Europe is degenerate; Ukraine is run by Nazis; Russia, unfairly deprived of its role in the world, is finally becoming a superpower again. To anyone who remembers how Communist ideology once sought to express all of history and all of contemporary politics through the lens of one giant conspiracy theory, this is nothing new. But who genuinely remembers?

Abroad, Russian-funded television, websites, and Internet troll factories make similar points in multiple languages. Russia also backs—in some cases financially, in other cases ideologically—politicians, businessmen, journalists, and “experts” who give out similar messages. They include Marine le Pen, the leader of the far right in France; Gerhard Schroeder, the former chancellor of Germany; Vaclav Klaus, the former Czech president, who is now associated with a think tank created by a sanctioned Russian oligarch. Members of the Hungarian and Austrian far-right parties have traveled to Crimea to support the Russian occupation. Syriza, the far-left party in Greece, has deep links to Russia, too.

Fake research institutions, “peace movements,” fictitious political groupings, useful idiots, and agents of influence, both paid and unpaid…We’ve been here before, too. True, the ideology has changed. These days Russia supports whoever is willing to promote its interests, whether far-left or far-right, and whoever can help undermine the established European order. Instead of attempting to foster an international Communist revolution, the primary goal is to keep Vladimir Putin in power and make the world safe for Russian corruption, Russian oligarchs, and Russian money. Which might, in fact, prove a lot more appealing than the dictatorship of the proletariat.