Talking to the Russian people is the only way out of this hell
Misha Glenny
Sunday March 13 2022, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
As the former communist states descended into economic chaos and war raged in Yugoslavia in 1993, I wrote a series of talks for the BBC called Loss of Innocence. It concluded with a warning: the West must provide structured economic assistance to Russia, like the Marshall Plan that put Germany back on its feet after the Second World War. Failure to do so would turn Russia into “a psychopathic giant” with nuclear weapons.
Instead, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we encouraged the free-for-all transition to a free-market economy aptly christened “gangster capitalism”. Thirty years on, the giant has awoken to start its bloody rampage, in large part because we didn’t provide that assistance.
Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine has already taken us to the gates of hell. Western officials are now gaming the possibility of a nuclear escalation. Still a remote prospect, but not inconceivable.
I hope they are also gaming the peace. Learning the lessons of history has never been more important. This moment will be as important historically as the Treaty of Versailles and the Yalta agreement.
The world is still suffering or recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic. Vladimir Putin’s huge gamble in Ukraine threatens a wider European and even a world conflict while sinking a stake into the heart of the global economy. The invasion has triggered numerous sub-dramas, each of which could descend into further violence, whether in the western Balkans, the Middle East and north Africa or east Asia.
With crises breaking out on so many fronts, it is hard to think strategically. But if the world is to avoid a wild spiral of uncontrolled conflicts and economic trauma, not to mention accelerating climate change, then governments need to be thinking seriously not only about what happens in the next six months but about how they respond to Moscow after the war is over, whether Russia wins or not.
“Globalisation has shifted on its axis,” says Rafal Rohozinski, founder of the Ottawa-based SecDev Group, which combines cyberanalysis with political intelligence. “Everything from the banking system to finance and logistics is being reordered. It’s the end of globalisation and the start of a new splinter world with its attendant chaos and uncertainties.”
As the former communist states fell into economic chaos and war raged in Yugoslavia in 1993, it was apparent that the West needed to provide economic assistance to Russia, like the post Second World War Marshall Plan
Managing this requires both the West and China to tread very carefully. After all, an imperfect peace at the end of the Cold War is how we got here. So what does the West do next?
First, we need to understand the Russian leader’s true purpose. “Putin has assumed that the time is ripe to overturn US-led global dominance,” explains Mark Medish, who was chief Russia adviser at the Treasury and the National Security Council in the Clinton administration. “This has long been his goal.”
Other authoritarian leaders almost certainly agree with Putin, including those in Beijing who have bridled under US moral tutelage and alleged double standards. Medish concludes that the chaos of the Trump presidency, the disarray of Europe, capped by Brexit and the authoritarian leanings in Hungary and Poland, and most recently the US withdrawal from Afghanistan “have bolstered Putin’s belief about the decline and fall of the West — and his decision to go for broke now”.
So Putin has laid down an existential challenge to the West. This is a zero-sum game that the Russian leader cannot afford to lose. Hence his apparent readiness to raise the stakes last week with the appalling bombing of Mariupol and the use of thermobaric weapons. This escalation brings greater destruction but it also suggests the Russian president is closer to defeat.
If Putin does lose, it opens up real opportunities. Convinced that Putin has overplayed his hand and will fall, Anthony Barnett, the author of Taking Control!, an analysis of American democracy after Trump and the pandemic, argues that “Putin’s defeat must be turned into a victory for democracy in Russia and Belarus as well as in Ukraine and a path for their renewal”.
The US and Europe’s biggest hope is for Ukraine to inflict a humiliating defeat on Russia’s military — no longer a fantasy but a real possibility, as the American political thinker Francis Fukuyama has argued. But it is Russians themselves, whether oligarchic and military malcontents or popular unrest, who must bring Putinism to an end.
If Putin is Russia’s problem, Russia is the West’s problem. With the horrors of Ukraine unfolding before our eyes, it is difficult to muster any sympathy for the Russians. Yet everyone now agrees that Putin has gone full Stalin. He orders the slaughter of civilians; he has protesters arrested and beaten up; he has clamped down on all independent media; and, tellingly, he humiliates his closest advisers in public.
If we concede he is a dictator, it follows that he is not representative of Russia and the Russian people. The West needs to embrace Russians with an intensity and sincerity hitherto unknown.
Western leaders should begin by mentioning at every opportunity that our quarrel is not with the Russian people but with its ruling clique. So far this has been missing from Joe Biden’s speeches. If our horror at the atrocities perpetrated by the Russian military tips over into a general Russophobia, we will lose the peace before the Ukrainians have won it.
The need to prepare Russians for the moment without Putin, which will be one of profound uncertainty, fear and chaos, is born of naked self-interest. The Americans did not launch the Marshall Plan in western Europe after the Second World War just out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it to create a huge consumer market for American goods and to consolidate their position as unchallenged leader of the western alliance.
The West will have to assist in putting the Russian economy back on its feet as it recovers from the devastating impact of sanctions (this is aside, of course, from the more pressing need to help in the rebuilding of Ukraine). Not to do so will sow the seeds of future conflict. Imposing punitive conditions on a great power will repeat the mistake of Versailles in 1919 — which Hitler exploited to great effect in his rise to power.
But the prize is worth it. Nurturing a Russia sympathetic to the West will reduce the seductive power of populists around the world. Putin has been the inspiration for many of these movements. He dazzled Donald Trump, who bows to Putin’s genius and vision as he does to no other.
Putin also considered Brexit a huge Russian success because it fragmented the West. Britain was the only country that belonged to the Anglophone Five Eyes intelligence network and the European Union. Putin believes he helped cut those vital links, weakening western security structures.
A strong, democratic Russia will also diminish the global influence of China. Here the US must resist the temptation to exploit any temporary discomfort that Beijing might experience. If the US and China do not collaborate in meeting the challenge of climate change, we will all end up losing.
There is still no guarantee that the West and Ukraine will come out of this on top. The war may well continue for some time. Until it is over, there will be a threat of catastrophic escalation. But if we avoid the worst, we will have a unique opportunity to restore faith in multilateral institutions and processes.
Conventional war and the pandemic have already inflicted immense damage on humanity. Western arrogance that followed the victory in the Cold War has not strengthened democracy but led to a more dangerous and capricious world. We are closer to a nuclear conflict than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in the early 1960s. To restore some degree of stability, a large dose of humility and a sober reading of history will do the West a power of good.
