Normally, when I read Victor Davis Hanson’s work, I come away smarter and more aware of the world around me, or the world before me. Yesterday, however, he struck a rare wrong note in his criticism of the President’s response to the Putinist seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea (NRO, emphasis in original):
Obama said in the CBS interview that Vladimir Putin was “willing to show a deeply held grievance about what he considers to be the loss of the Soviet Union.”
Is that any surprise? Why would Putin not “show a deeply held grievance” — given that Russians enjoyed far more pride and influence when they had far more territory and power than they do now?
To be fair to Hanson, this is very much the conventional wisdom about the Russian people – that they were much happier about themselves in the USSR. Based on what I remember of the early 1990s, however, this is also very, very wrong.
For starters, the end of the Soviet Union might have been a triumph for “the West,” but it wasn’t caused by “the West.” Anyone who remembered the Bush I Administration (including a bizarre speech from the president himself in Kiev demanding Ukraine stay in the USSR) knows that the capitals and elites of the free world met the end of the Soviet Union with great ambivalence.
It was the Russians that chose to end the USSR, through they’re elected president and champion: Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin reflected, built, and capitalized on Russian anger and frustration about their role in the USSR – mainly, praised nationalistically in public while gouged financially and ignored in private.
What the Russians learned in the late 1980s was the same thing the Brits concluded in the 1920s (and the French in the 1960s): empires cost. It was that cost that the Russians rejected in the early 1990s. Through Yeltsin – and especially with Yeltsin as they stood up to the 1991 putschists – the Russians chose to stop being an empire and start being a nation.
This would be well-known to anyone who was in Moscow during this time…and that’s the problem – Vladimir Putin was not in Russia during this period. He was in East Germany, not witnessing the decision his people made.
Now, that decision has been forgotten – in no small part by Russians themselves, who have lived through very trying times when its leaders (Yeltsin included) failed to make Russia a decent nation. Unfortunately, Putin’s absence during this period has likely led him to believe that he can rebuild the empire. In the short term, it might work, but Russians will remember the cost of empire again, and reject it.
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