Over the last decade of his more than two decades as absolute ruler of Russia, Vladimir Putin has repulsed domestic opposition, re-pressing civil society and human rights defenders in the Russian iteration of anti-democracy operations worldwide. But, as former Canadian Am-bassador to Russia Jeremy Kinsman writes, Putin’s increasingly dysfunc-tional relationship with the Russian people has its roots in the trauma of the last century as well as in the power abuses of this one. 

Jeremy Kinsman

Part One: The Despot’s War

For weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, US intelligence agencies had publicly predicted it was Vladimir Putin’s intention. Most experts and commenta-tors, even most NATO countries, believed he was bluffing to intimidate Ukraine into debilitating concessions. If Russians did cross the border, they expected only a limited demo thrust of armour, to cow Ukraine into submission. A brazen full invasion was deemed unthinkable — an 18th century power play that had no place in 21st century Europe. Besides, how could Russia occupy a country of 44 million?

In ordering his armed forces to take the capital, Kyiv, to decapitate the Ukrainian government, to occupy the country and end its existence as a sovereign state, Putin stared down the objections of a stunned world trying to grasp how it had got him so wrong. 

Putin’s obsession with making Russia great again had indeed been spun into delusion by his addiction to 18th century assumptions beyond our imagination, mainly that “might means right.” But having misread almost everything, Putin’s plan of conquest is failing. For the sake of the world, it must fail. 

That great idiom about fate — “Cometh the hour, cometh the Man” — has a wor-thy personification in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. At the outset, US officials offered to spirit the Ukrainian leader to safety from the expected Russian juggernaut speeding toward Kyiv. Zelensky curtly retorted that what he needed was “ammunition, not a ride.”

He has united a divided Ukraine to stanch the invasion, out-soldiering the Russian army, which has seemed incompetent in every task save criminal abuse of those places it briefly occupied. The high-tech arms for Ukraine to fight with have been invaluable, the US providing already over seven times the value of Ukraine’s annual military budget.

Putin has miscalculated on every level. He believes a long war will work in his favour as Western will fractures against the divisive wear and tear of energy shortages and consequent inflation. But he has woefully underestimated the unity of Western countries, as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised recently in Prague, “for as long as it takes.” Longer-term, the prognosis for the Russian economy is crippling. Russia’s principal market for oil and gas, Europe, has already re-oriented long-term supply.

Born in the midst of Russia’s horrible 20th century, Vladimir Putin is truly “homo sovieticus,” suffering from limitations a closed totalitarian society imposed on its citizens, including ignorance about what makes the rest of the world, especially Western democracies, tick. He misunderstands as weakness and decline the normal democratic cacophony of competing voices and forces in liberal democracies. He simply doesn’t get it, and so he has got wrong the rapport de forces at every level of comparison, except possibly that of thermonuclear posture.

Putin is the worst combination of ego, autocratic instinct, and longevity in uncontested power. His competitive nature insists he be seen as the smartest person in any room. He is the nation’s only decider, unnourished by contrary opinion, seeing himself as the only one strong enough to do the really rough things that his mis-sion calls for. His belief in the decisive impact of power is a great danger. He brandishes nuclear threats, believing his adversaries will buckle before him. 

He is consumed by grievance over the perceived relegation of his country from imperial and superpower greatness to the world’s B-Team. He has sought a coun-ter-narrative of Russian exceptionalism spun from cult-like historical musings of leadership of a Eurasian civilization. But his notion of “Russkiy mir,” a “Russian world sphere,” will mean a Russia alone in the world.

Putin especially doesn’t get the post-Second World War normative interdiction of invasion of a neighbour. To Russians, the Second World War was about defending the motherland. To other victorious allies, the war’s lesson for the ages was about “Never again”; the adoption of an irreducible new norm that would make a repeat of Europe’s murderous wars unimaginable. Putin didn’t get that our normally short-termist, competitive democratic leaders would defend the inviolable norm against invasion as an existential global necessity.

Putin was probably pleased when President Joe Biden and some others in the West at first described the Ukraine War as a clash between democracy and autocracy, on the assumption that it would turn off  non-democratic members of the UN. He apparently hadn’t expected that the wider world would increasingly wish — as a vote in the UN General Assembly on October 12 illustrates — to safeguard its dependence on the post-World War Two norm of defence of sovereignty. Even abstaining China and India have begun to express growing misgivings over the disruption of his war.

A champion of “whataboutism,” Putin thought that the ultimately catastrophic US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, undertaken without international support (as en-joyed by the 1991 U.N. expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait), provided cover as a precedent. 

But just as Americans eventually rejected the Iraq invasion as self-destructive, Russians will sooner or later turn against Putin’s losing war on another country’s soil. On September 21, any Russians still trying to ignore the war swiftly under-stood, when Putin ordered a partial military mobilization, that the war was now coming for them.

Part Two: ‘Why Can’t We Be Normal?’

When I was serving as Canada’s ambassador to Russia during the early 1990s, the two-word answer most often heard to the ordinary question, “How are things?” (как дела?) was “Vsyo normalno….” (все нормально)

“Everything’s normal.” 

It could mean anything. For instance:

– “My life is as much a sea of shit as ever.”

– “What can we expect in this circus of a country?”

– “The thieves are getting richer.”

– or, from politsiya to a rubbernecking driver slowing to gape at roadside bodies, “Move on”.

But the fatalistic acceptance of what is “normal” has a flip side, that expresses the Russian wish to have “normal” lives, by the standards of the European world they welcomed joining thirty years ago.

In October 1993, a violent attempt to overturn the young democratic Yeltsin regime terrorized Moscow, the result of a struggle between the reformist executive and the Soviet-era parliament that resisted reforms amid rampant social and economic upheaval. The parliament declared a new president, and sent its private ar-my of Afghanistan war vets armed to the teeth on flatbed trucks racing along the ring road, shooting up the city and the TV tower, blanking the news out. No one knew who would win. By Monday morning, TV was back on to show tanks firing on the insurgent parliament (all but two shells were blanks), enough to end the coup. But 173 had died from the weekend’s street fights (Not from the tanks, as some faulty Western memoirs have it). That morning, traumatized TV panels asked, aghast, “Why can’t we be normal?”

There had been nothing “normal” about Russia’s horrible 20th century. In 1937-38 about 1,000 citizens were executed per day, including most of the General Staff. Bullets to the back of the neck in the Lubyanka basement over two years of madness: artists, intellectuals, wise guys, and nobodies — 700,000 murdered, their families and tens of millions of others left traumatized.

PTSD can be an affliction to whole peoples, not just to traumatized individuals, even inter-generationally, as Helen Epstein describes in “Children of the Holocaust.” Some countries cope with it: Henry Kissinger termed Germany “A normal country with an abnormal memory.” But Russia’s abnormal memory continues to hobble its citizens 3 – 4 generations after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

For Putin, that legacy of trauma, projected in a disproportionately defensive, vindictive relationship with power and a swaggering, compensatory nationalism, is playing out now in his treatment of Ukraine and belligerence toward the world. 

The Russian people experienced two major breaks in domestic oppression in the 20th century: The Second World War and glasnost.

In 1941, Hitler’s invasion substituted an external threat for internal terror. Rus-sians ultimately prevailed at the appalling cost of 26 million lives. Does Putin grasp that the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45, since revered as the touchstone of inherent Russian greatness, is the only war in 170 years the Russians have won? Because they were defending their homeland. 

“In the 20th century, they lost to Japan in 1905, and to the Finns in 1940. The Russian Imperial Army collapsed in 1917, precipitating the October Revolution. And then, Afghanistan. In each ignominious defeat they were the invaders, defeated by peoples defending their homelands, as Ukrainians are doing today. Perhaps it explains why Putin is so keen to declare as annexed the still-unpossessed parts of the Donbas, to rally dubious Russians to a concocted script of patriotic self-defence.

The second major break from Soviet oppression was Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision in 1986 to award citizens their freedom with glasnost. Gorbachev believed the burdensome psychological legacy of the past was an obstacle to the massive and unprecedented transformation from communism to its opposite that he intended — without really knowing how to implement it. (Who did? Certainly not Western “advisers” who didn’t have a clue, apart from “shock therapy”, which was much more shock than therapy.)

For a few years, euphoria reigned. Gorbachev created Memorial, the NGO devot-ed to researching the mass crimes conducted against Soviet citizens that Putin later suppressed and that has shared the 2022 Nobel Peace prize. The secret police were dismantled as a force of oppression. Gorbachev ended the Cold War. America was “approved” by 80 percent of Russians, Gorbachev by not much less.

It fell apart, doomed by incompetence, corruption and what former Washington Post correspondent David Remnick termed in Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, the “wreckage of everyday life.” The cops weren’t banging on the door at 3 a.m. anymore, they were shaking down citizens at every traffic junction for a bribe. Men drank themselves to death, not knowing what to do with their “freedom.”

Russians supported the break-up of the USSR, which Boris Yeltsin brokered in order to replace Gorbachev, ushering in the most non-violent end of any empire in history. But its loose ends stranded millions of ethnic Russians as minorities in new republics. Russians began to feel like losers. 

At the conclusion of their frightful century, they placed their hope in a new president whose only promise in his New Year’s Day acceptance speech was — ironi-cally in retrospect — to sustain democracy. In return, Russians accepted to settle down as part of a bargain in which Putin would deliver stability and security to the wrecked country.

Putin built his reputation on always doing what he promised. The missing caveat is always, “what I believe in.” Putin never truly grasped democracy and in power soon ceased his efforts, subtracting still-fragile democratic space from early on. 

He did deliver prosperity — or rather the soaring price of energy did. But after hunkering down for a decade, professionals, students, and the many who by then had travelled and experienced norms everywhere in the West, impatient over their own state of imposed political infantilism asked again, “Why can’t we be more normal?” They poured into the streets in 2011. He cracked down with batons and jail. 

Today, Russia has reverted to the old normal of a police state. Putin boasts that Russians are resilient, and will prevail in a long war. Analysts assess that 60 per-cent of Russians have gone along passively with Putin’s war by not thinking about it, keeping their heads down out of PTSD muscle memory.

But Putin is right to fear the counter-resurgence of possibly more powerful Russian DNA. He saw revolution in East Germany. It scared him in 2011 in Russia. It is why he went so far as to condone the attempt to kill opposition figure Alexei Navalny. He knows that Russians can rise up.

To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, when things fall apart, it happens first gradually, and then suddenly. By attacking a neighbour whose peo-ple were integrated into Russian psychology and habit, not as vassals, as Putin pre-tends, but as family, he riskily tested how far he could manage how people think. He has propaganda proxies assisting him in that effort; once superficially smooth international operators such as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and former President Dmitry Medvedev who now recite Putin’s preposterous lies about Ukraine’s “Nazi” regime, illustrating the damage done to the Russian psyche by living under lies for three generations. 

Now, with the reality of mobilization, and at least 80,000 body bags, the war and Putin’s lies are coming home to ordinary people. The recent escalation in long-range bombing of Ukrainians — who are defeating Russian soldiers close-up every day — won’t win many Russian hearts and minds. As the young and bright take Russia’s future to the exits, apprehension of generalized economic loss is growing. There is shame apparent that the very name “Russian” has been debased, undermining the most important asset of a leader in war — which even Stalin had in 1940-45 and that Zelensky enjoys a surplus of — the support and commitment of the people.

There was, several years ago, a scholars’ debate in Russia as to whether it was in-deed “Putin’s Russia” or, alternatively, whether he might be just “Russia’s Putin,” that anyone in that job would be doing more or less the same. Then, when what he was doing divided from what many people wanted, the slogan emerged of “Russiya bez Putina”: “Russia without Putin.”

Can Putin be fired? Sidled out? Usurped? By whom? In time, the people will decide Russia’s fate. They have made Russian history before and will again.  

Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman is a former Ambassador to Moscow from 1992-96, High Commissioner to London as well as Ambassador to the EU and Rome. One of Canada’s most experienced foreign affairs hands, he is now a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.