The Ukrainian war in historical context: a glance at recent Russian history

Russia.

Geographically it is vast. It spans nine time zones and contains many different ethnic peoples and languages. It has produced word-class scientists, artists, authors, musicians to the years; the country has contributed much to human knowledge.

It's leader is currently responsible for perhaps the largest refugee crisis Europe has seen since the Second World War. In times of war, it's always important to separate out the leader of the country from its people.

Putin is Russian, but not all of Russia is Putin.

What is the history of Russia?

How did we get here?

How did we get to Putin?

I'm no expert historian, but I did study Russian history at university, particularly the recent history, I've have read some works from Russian writers, take an interest in the country, people, and culture.

What I offer here is an outline of what I think are the relevant historical events which help us understand why Russia is as it is today. And how we got to Putin.

16th - 20th century: Czarism

Russia's history is distinct from that of Europe. Russia has its own identity, culture and values. It was ruled by Czar's (essentially an all powerful emperor/empress) from 1533 until 1917.

Czarist rule was traditionally top-down, autocratic, religious and all powerful. Indeed, Russia has a long history of strong leadership.

Getting close to the time of First World War there was growing discontent within Russia about the authoritarian leadership. This was compounded by a humiliating and costly defeat against Japan in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War.

Russia left the First World War in 1917 after suffering, again, terrible losses. While the world war aged on around Europe and the world, Russia had a war of its own to fight.

1917 - 1991: communism

Russia was the first place for the ideals laid out in the Communist Manifesto to be implemented. Lenin, who became the leader of the Russian Communist Party, took charge in 1917 and marked a new era in political history.

The tone of the new era was set after the murder of the former Czar Nicholas II and his family who were killed in cold blood by communist orderlies.

A new Russian identity was born; the Soviet Union.

Communist ideals can be boiled down to an alternative to capitalist ideals. They simply represent an alternative way to live and be in the world.

Communist ideals are about equality. Hence began an era of the government seizing land and wealth in an attempt to redistribute from the top down.

Unfortunately, to uphold the equality of Communist ideals - to make them work in the world - much had to be enforced, often brutally. For students of history part of the famous redistribution programme is known as Kullakisation.

Kulaks, rich peasants, were often farmers who owned a bit more land. or a few more animals than their neighbours. This was part of a broader policy of collectivisation.

Indeed, its estimated that 91% of agricultural land was owned by the government by the 1930s. Students of history are also encouraged to learn about the death toll these policies of equality caused.

The death toll is estimated to be between 4 and 7 million people. There is much to be said for this period, like the fact that prisons known as Gulags were set up early in Lenin's rule for "enemies of the people" (1).

For those interested in the lessons of recent history, there is no better first hand account of communist Russia than Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. This is easily the best account I've come across for learning about the darker side of Russia's recent communist history and the most unlikely to ever reach publication, since it was published during a time of mass censorship.

Indeed, empirical evidence suggests that Communist ideals, in Russia, China and beyond, are responsible for more deaths than authoritarianism or Nazism (2).

Why?

The fundamental reason seems to be something like this:

if people have an idea in their heads about how they think the world can be better, they will be willing to make many, many sacrifices to make the world a better place, no matter the cost.

According to Solzhenitsyn, what made the communists so brutal was their ideology.

One example can illustrate this. The Soviet authorities led by Stalin in the early 1930s are thought to be responsible for a Holodomor in Ukraine.

That is, millions of Ukrainian people staved to death as a result of communist policies, as a result of Moscow pursuing some higher ideal.

Instead of acknowledging the harm that was being done and the enormous human cost of the policies, censorship ruled. This meant that suffering was all around, but people had to pretend like it was OK.

For those that spoke out, they would find themselves in the Gulag; enemies of the people.

Millions can die, be sent to prison, be censored, because we are pursuing a higher ideal. In this case the higher ideal is a nice sounding and reasonable proposition: equality.

The movie Hot Fuzz captured this sentiment precisely when the villagers live in 'the safest village in the country' because 'accidents don't happen here'.

True, there were no accidents. Instead there were intentional murders to keep the ideal of the crime free village. The people repeat the mantra:

"for the greater good".

The problem with the greater good is that it is infinite. If we are making an equal world, how much killing are we willing to do in order to achieve this?

In the case of Hot Fuzz and communist Russia the answer is the same: we are willing to kill and keep on killing to protect our idea, no matter the cost.

Russian history offers the lesson that when ideas become sacred they lose their ability to pitted against other ideas with reason. When competing ideas are not allowed to be voiced, we have a massive problem.

The greatest failure of communist was its self confidence, its self belief, its self esteem.

I think the metaphor of domestic violence can help understand communist Russia. Part of the difficulty of domestic violence is that it often comes bundled up as part of a package that includes love.

Communist ideas come as bundled up with the package of equality, of making the world a better place, of love. I think this makes it hard to disentangle it from the violence is induces and the harm it does.

An architect of Communist ideas, Karl Marx, is quoted as saying that religion is the opiate of the people. But in Russia - and in countries around the world that also implemented communist ideas - it is communism that is the religion.

It is a high ideal to be pursued no matter the cost - whether human or economic (3).

The historian of genocide Daniel Chirot and social psychologist Clark McCauley observe the comparison between Communism and Christianity:

"In the beginning there was a world with no private property, no classes, no exploitation, no alienation - the Garden of Eden. Then came sin, the discovery of private property, and the creation of exploiters. Humanity was cast from the Garden to suffer inequality and want. Humans then experimented with a series of modes of production, from the slave, to the feudal, to the capitalist mode, always seeking the solution but not finding it. Finally there came a true prophet with a message of salvation, Karl Marx, who preached the truth of Science. He promised redemption but was not heeded, except by his close disciples who carried truth forward. Eventually, however, the proletariat, the carriers of true faith, will be converted by the religious elect, the leaders of the party, and join to create a more perfect world. A final, terrible revolution will wipe out capitalism, alienation, exploitation, and inequality. After that, history will end because there will be perfection on earth, and the true believers will have been saved". (2)

But communist Russia didn't last.

The fall of the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union collapsed.

It was Russia's Empire. It was big.

Visually it looks like this:

In list form looks like this:

• Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
• Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic
• Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic
• Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic
• Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic
• Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic
• Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic
• Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic
• Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic
• Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic
• Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic
• Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic
• Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic
• Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic
• Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

And a mathematical form like this:

"With the eastern part of Europe and the northern part of Asia, the USSR has become the world’s largest country with a surface area of 22.402.400 km². At the same time, USSR ranked 3rd in the world with 293,047,571 million (June 1991) population."

In the West the term "iron curtain" was popularised. The idea captured the fact that countries in the Soviet Union sat behind an iron curtain of state censorship.

This simply meant that people in the West didn't really know what was going on behind closed doors. Behind the closed doors Russia controlled everything.

They were a central glue holding a diverse set of country and peoples together, the economy, the arts, the media, the history taught in schools: all state controlled.

The Soviet Union had a history of discontent. In 1950s Hungary there was an uprising and so too in 1960s Prague. Both were met with Russian tanks, which effectively sent the message: if you rebel against Moscow, you will face the cold bullets of Moscow.

Empirical evidence suggests that centralised economies are inefficient, which in real terms means that people have to queue up to buy a limited amount of things (4). This was indeed normal life for members of the Soviet Union.

Towards the end of the Union the price of holding it all together was becoming too expensive. Centralised economics played a role; they were simply governing a huge amount of area and people inefficiently, which meant that it really was expensive for Russia to maintain the system.

Politically, the people in the various countries wanted their own independence and freedoms. This came to a head in the mid 1980s.

In Poland, for example, a recently elected Polish Pope John Paul II spoke to a massive Polish crowd, who were hungry for reform, about a better life. The Russian state censored pretty much everything, but censoring the Pope was difficult.

The leader Mikhail Gorbachev ruled Russia from 1985 to 1991 and whose policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) radically altered the countries history, the biggest change since czarism to communism.

Broadly, the Soviet Union collapsed because of these three reasons:

1) economic inefficiencies

2) the people wanting change themselves in these countries

3) the Soviet leadership itself implementing the changes

For us in the West, this marked the end of the Cold War. But the collapse of the Soviet Union was not positive for all.

And despite the death count for maintaining the Soviet Union system being in the tens of millions, it did have its utility to everyday, normal people.

A new Russia: Putin's Russia

The Soviet Union collapsed. So what happened in Russia, and in the other 14 countries?

Economic collapse happened (5).

Recall that these countries were bound together like glue by Russia. It is not hard to see how removing the glue could cause problems.

Let us compare Russia's loss of the Soviet Union against drastic changes in different places in different times.

• A conflict over parliamentarians and royalists, in a battle over the political domain 17th century England led to civil war
• The revolution in 18th century France quickly descended into killing, and gave rise to the leadership of Napoleon and the wars that followed.
• When 19th century America wanted to abolish slavery they had a civil war.
• The end of colonial rule all across the world in the 20th century has been quickly followed by civil wars or associated crises, as in Ireland, India, Pakistan, Sudan, Rwanda, Algeria, Nigeria, Indonesia, Uganda, and Vietnam.
• Harsh economic sanctions on Germany after the first world war helped to create a space for radical new ideas: Nazism.

In short, I think there's a good case to be made that:

radical changes or disruptions at scale in politics and economics can lead to a period of instability, which creates a vacuum, which is then filled by a strongman

Of course, there are many cases in which countries go through radical changes and there is no war.

Some examples include:

• the Glorious or Bloodless revolution in 17th century England
• the reunification 20th century of Germany
• the 20th century revolutions in post Soviet Union countries were largely peaceful, as in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia

Political transitions do not inevitably lead to wars like a mathematical formula. But the two things have certainly gone together in the past.

For all of the harshness of living in a communist system there were indeed benefits to normal people. There wasn't much freedom - whether in music taste, food, cultural expression, freedom of speech or inquiry - but there was a general stability (5). Things were inefficient, but people had a routine, were in work, and had access to regular food( after queueing).

Is it surprising, then, that a such a radical change could cause disruption to political elites and to normal people? No.

Such a sharpness of change in policy - the end of a Soviet identity, the overhaul of an entire economic system, a shift in politics - brought much hardship to the people of Russia, and their politicians.

What happened to Russia post Soviet Union?

Massive change creates discontent. In this discontent a kind of vacuum is created and this is filled by somebody. Usually a strongman who offers strength, stability, nostalgia, ruthlessness, identity. I think this is what happened in Russia

This is my best understanding of Russia and Putin today.

Putin is a strongman. A former officer of the secret police. He is nostalgic for the old Russia. The Czarist Russia. He's been in charge for a total of 16 years.

He offers Russians their traditional strong, authoritarian leadership, while also maintaining a feeling of a strong Russian identity. One that is qualitatively different to the West.

It's the identity of Russian art, culture, tradition, religion, and orthodoxy. It's different to Western values - it need not include freedom of expression, freedom of love, or political freedoms.

But he is capturing the a part of the Russian psyche that is real, valid, and is embedded in Russian history, at least part of it.

Does any of this justify the war in Ukraine? No, of course not. To understand is not to forgive.

After the collapse, Russia did open up. But only for a time. Within 10 years of the Soviet Union falling, and with it censorship, government once again controlled the media (6).

Putin's direct control over the media allows him to tell the story he wants to Russian people. In his essay, published 12th July 2021, Putin expounds what he "firmly believes" about the relationship between Russia and Ukraine.

Throughout the essay, Putin keeps referring back to the theme that Russia and Ukraine are one people. That modern Ukrainian ideas of independence are not grounded in history, but come from Western ideas, propagandas.

It's a terrifying read, because to me it comes across as well-researched, thoughtful and reasonable. And yet, it concludes:

"And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide."

If the essay comes across as fairly reasonable to me - a master's student in the UK and former student of history - then it probably also came across as reasonable to the Russian soldiers who were (probably) given it to read before invading Ukraine.

I think domestic violence is, again, a good metaphor. Putin is the lover who "respects" Ukraine, who affirms their history, who loves their culture and people, and yet is willing to invade, drop bombs, and wreak mass havoc.

Putin obviously has a point about the shared historic idendity of both nations, because modern day Kiev is the birthplace of Russian and Ukrainian culture, and Russians are the largest ethnic minority in Ukraine.

They are the largest Russian community outside of Russia itself - approximately 8 million people from Ukraine's population of 41 million.

And yet. This conflict really would be much more complicated if the opinion in Ukraine was divided, as in the case of Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

But what evidence is there that Ukraine wants to be close to Russia or wants independence?

Ukraine's voice

I believe there are two pieces of empirical evidence that highlight what people living in Ukraine want.

1) In December 1991 there was a vote for independence in Ukraine. More than 90% of Ukrainian's voted in favour of this.

2) A majority of Ukrainian refugees are not fleeing to Russia, but to Europe

The UN says that as of 9 March:

• Poland has taken in 1,412,502 refugees
• Hungary 214,160
• Slovakia 165,199

Russia 97,098

• Romania 84,671
• Moldova 82,762
• Belarus 765

Obviously things are much more complicated than "two pieces of evidence" but I think they're powerful.

It really does seem like a majority of people in Ukraine want to live independently with their own identity separate from Russia, and a majority don't seem to be seeking shelter in the Russian motherland.

It looks like Putin's idea for Ukraine exists firmly in his mind.

But perhaps this image is not viewed, felt, perceived as clearly in the minds of the Ukrainian's themselves.

They aren't fleeing to Russia en masse and they are voting for their own independence.

Conclusions about modern Russia and its war in Ukraine

Russian history puts this war into context. We've seen how the destabilisation of political regimes - ether in England, France, in colonial times across the world, and in post-war Germany - often leads to periods of discontent and a vacuum, and then to war.

It does not inevitably lead to this and there are examples of peaceful transitions, but I think it is somewhat understandable that mass instability leads to leaders like Putin.

Putin's war in Ukraine seems to be about reclaiming what Russia has lost: its identity as a global superpower, a cultural icon worthy of respect, the shared history between Russia and Ukraine.

When the Soviet Union fell, Russia lost much of its credibility around the world. But it seems to be the individual drive of Putin that is causing this war, who is taking it upon himself to right his perceived wrongdoings of history.

Former Soviet countries have tended towards liberal democracy and Ukraine is no different. Ukraine is different, however, in its geographical location and historical importance.

Perhaps Putin views the fall of Ukraine to democracy in a similar way to how the West used to view the expansion of communism.

The expansion of communism was viewed as a domino effect: as one country embraces the ideals, so too will the next one. First China, then Vietnam, India, Afghanistan, then Communism will be in Europe - like the spread of an infectious disease; eventually it will be United States who falls.

It is easy to see how Russia could hold such a view about the trend of former Soviet countries tending towards liberal democracy.

Ultimately, the independent state of Ukraine may represent an existential threat to Putin and his idea of Russia, because if it can spread to Ukraine, then why not to Russia itself?And this is historically significant because Ukraine is the birthplace of modern Russian and Ukrainian culture.

Importantly, Putin does not represent all of Russia, it's ideals, its history or its people. He is one man among many Russians and his view of history does not stand up to the facts of what Ukrainian people are currently doing: voting democratically and fleeing west.

It is not easy to see how this will all end. What is certainly happening though is a kind of galvanising effect: the more Putin invades and does harm in Ukraine, the more the Ukrainians will feel united in their own independence and desire to be free of Russia.

Similarly, those Russian soldiers doing the damage all across Ukraine will come across people who do not want them here.

And those soldiers themselves may begin to question the validity of the story they've been told, of their own beliefs in the sovereignty of Ukraine, of their allegiance to the leadership of Putin - the person who is ultimately responsible for this war.

It seems like the majority of everyday Russians currently buy into the war in Ukraine. They've been fed state media justifying it. But there are protests around the country.

Although people are jailed for acts of defiance against the state, the history of tyrannical regimes suggests that they cannot last when people do not support them.

I think Putin has done his leadership great harm in invading Ukraine - both in Russia and beyond.

How pointless the whole thing seems, how futile. Alas, that's why I think the history is important. History can always tell the story of how we got to where we are today, whether in our personal lives or in times of international war. It's not much, but it's something.

Finally, here are the list of places in Sheffield that are taking donations to help those affected by the war in Ukraine. Whether money, camping supplies, toiletries, clothes, or food.

Here’s where you can donate supplies for Ukraine in Sheffield

Collection organisers across the city are looking for clothing, medicine and toiletries, among other items.

Now Then Sheffield

References

1) Alexander Solzhenitsyn The gulag archipelago: an experiment in literary investigation (2007/1962)

2) Steven Pinker, The better angels of our nature (2012)

3) Stephen Hicks, Explaining postmodernism (2002) free audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQcNjHNXnEE&ab_channel=CEEVideoChannel

4) Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (2000) free audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrPxEmOV0YI&ab_channel=WesternTruthRadio

5) Simon Reeve, Step by step (2019)

6) Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is true and everything is possible (2016)