Stephan: I spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union between 1981 and 1993, particularly in Moscow and Leningrad/St Petersburg. I owned businesses there and worked on art exchanges, and what we called Citizen Diplomacy. My observation about what is happening is that Putin is less Yuri Andropov, or even Stalin, and more like Hitler. Not communism but fascist quite nasty authoritarianism. Think about it. How would you feel if a law were passed that you could go to prison for mentioning anything about the economy, no matter what you saw or heard happening? How would that go down in the U.S., do you think? And yet just such a law was imposed by Putin in Moscow. I think the citizens of Russia, particularly the urban population are not going to quietly accept the new Putin. He is trying to sell this as bad things Americans and the West are doing to innocent Russia. It will sell with older, less educated, rural men and women. Same thing is going on here in the MAGAt world.
Vladimir Putin at his inauguration ceremony in the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow, Russia on May 7, 2018. Credit: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Photo
Would Mikhail Gorbachev have invaded Ukraine if he, and not Vladimir Putin, were president of Russia? Most Kremlin-watchers would probably say no. It’s hard to imagine that the architect of perestroika would have embarked on the wholesale destruction of a country of 40 million.
It’s equally hard to imagine independent Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, attempting genocide. Russian forces committed numerous atrocities on Yeltsin’s watch in two Chechen Wars, but they stopped short of exterminating the population and claiming it had no right to exist. Indeed, even Soviet Party boss Leonid Brezhnev, who launched invasions into Afghanistan and Czechoslovakia, did not pursue the kind of scorched-earth strategy Putin has unleashed on Ukraine.
Historians call these kinds of “what if” questions counterfactuals, and they are useful because they help identify the factor or factors that best explain some phenomenon. Because neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin nor Brezhnev can be imagined attacking Ukraine’s civilian population as indiscriminately as Putin, […]
