Putin’s Fulfillment of Russian History

Introduction

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president until 2018, seems set on antagonizing leaders of countries surrounding Russia and others who must deal with his increasingly aggressive foreign policy decisions. Western leaders, the public, and the media, for the most part, denounce his attempts to regain territories he argues are and always have belonged to “Mother Russia.” Thus he is seen as continuously endeavoring to reintegrate “lost Russian provinces” rather than independent countries. Even when outsiders seem to understand him, such as in an interview, he may set off in an unexpected direction, thus confounding those who might actually support him.

Putin and his countrymen see the situation differently. They argue that the NATO affiliated countries that surround Western Russia are threatening its borders, if not its very existence. Additionally, they argue that Russia’s interests must be defended wherever possible. Furthermore, that the many millions of Russian speakers must be reintegrated into the Russian fold, by means of force if necessary. More than this, Putin and the Russian public seem tuned to the same chord; they see Russia as a great power, as it has been idealized under Peter the Great, Stalin, and other rulers.

Nuanced approaches to these different visions have become almost impossible. However, understanding Putin’s background and his internal motivations better would be especially helpful for Western nations.

Siege, War, KGB, and Russian History

Putin, born in 1952 as the third and only surviving son of a

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Leningrad (now again St. Petersburg) couple, was deeply influenced and shaped by several major circumstances and events.

First, during his childhood, the city had just begun to recover from the terrible, nearly 900-day siege by the German armed forces. Important for Putin’s development is that his older brother died in 1942 during the siege and his father barely rescued his mother during the same time as she was about to be carted off as dead by a crew removing bodies from apartments and streets. There is an additional undertone to this experience; the city is associated with Peter the Great and yet remained for long periods of time at the periphery of the vast Russian Empire. Despite its importance, it could not because of distance and did not because of a lack of will receive sufficient support from the central government during the siege.

Because Putin was born after WWII, he experienced neither the encirclement of the city nor the war itself, but his worldview was shaped in part by the stories of that time and the tangible destruction. When I visited the city for the first time in the early 60s, it had just begun to recover in demonstrable ways, but even then the evidence of the war remained readily discernable.

To support my point, 70 years after the liberation of Leningrad, Putin movingly spoke at the Leningrad war memorial about his city’s encirclement and the heroism of the Soviet soldiers who finally freed the city from the German forces on January 26, 1944.

Indeed, the physical encirclement of Leningrad fed into Putin’s childhood understanding of the world, as did throwing off the siege and winning the Great Patriotic War. Today the hardships of the siege and the heroism of the war reverberate in his and his fellow citizens’ psyche as both a perceived and real fear of NATO and other encirclements that must be resisted and broken. His father’s wartime sacrifices and his dramatic rescue of his mother have led Putin to assume/integrate how he, as the son, can and must save the Motherland. There would be no greater fulfillment of his father’s memory than to reenact his sacrifice and heroism. Like father, like son.

Putin’s KGB training and its associated assignment in East Germany reinforced his fear of outsiders. He served there during the height of the Cold War with American missiles staring down from the West and Chinese armies threatening from the East. My lengthy conversations with one of Nikita Khrushchev’s attendants in New York City in the early 1960s confirmed this paranoia. The

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young KGB officer was deeply afraid of Chinese hordes coming across the Mongolian border and overwhelming lesser Soviet forces. Coincidentally, he was from Leningrad, but I did not understand then the potential connection between paranoia of outsiders and the past of that city.

Second, the trauma of the post-siege experience and losses of the Second World War lingered throughout Soviet and Russian society and in Putin’s own family. His father fought and was wounded during that war; he related to his son details of his combat exposures. These tales intrigued the boy and influenced him sufficiently to have specialists later double-check and, ultimately, confirm his father’s experiences.

Along with what Putin learned about the trauma of Leningrad’s encirclement, his father’s stories, and other sources of information about WWII (including movies of the 50s and 60s that often glorified the war), the young man grew convinced that war was a viable, and possibly desirable, test of internal strength and greatness. The then Soviet Union was nearly overrun by the German armed forces and the Western parts of the country experienced a brutal occupation, an enormous loss of human life, and the destruction of almost the entire area’s infrastructure. One important aspect learned was that the Soviet Union recovered, like the Russian Empire had many times before, and that part of this lesson was and is that only courage, fighting, and sacrifice can break encirclements and serve Russia’s true national interests. For example, he said at the Victory Day Parade on May 10, 2015: “Our fathers and grandfathers lived through unbearable sufferings, hardships and losses. They worked till exhaustion, at the limit of human capacity. They fought even unto death. They proved the example of honour [sic] and true patriotism” (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/vladimir-putin-victory-day-not-my-grandmother).

Third, it is a valid assumption that Putin, like the vast majority of Russian children then, was swaddled and beaten regularly both at home and in school. In an exception to the rule though, he was beaten by his father, not his mother. While some psychohistorians have argued that one should not over-emphasize the impact of swaddling and abusive childrearing practices like beating and shaming, most children tend to repeat the practices of their parents. While psychohistorian Lloyd deMause argued that some children learn from the abuse of their parents not to do the same to their own children and thus potentially create a new psycho-class, many chil-

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dren copy parental abuse and later practice it as a tool for their own private and public gain. Their experience, in other words, can become a crude or sophisticated approach to manipulate and oppress those around them. In Putin’s case, we know that he not only beat his wife while he served in the KGB in then East Germany, but he also “slept around,” freeing himself, in a sense, from the hold of her authority. His KGB training in addition helped him refine his thinking about how to deal with internal dissent.

Fourth, Putin’s first name fits well with Russia’s past. Named after Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Kiev, Putin did not openly write or speak of his namesake, but it would be surprising if he did not find himself attracted to this medieval conqueror and saint. As a matter of fact, he argued during a 60 Minutes interview in September 2015 that Kiev was part of Russian history from the very beginning. Indeed, even American, Russian, and Soviet history courses for decades began with Kievan Rus (present day Ukraine).

This is a central aspect of Putin’s understanding of the past and explains much about the Russian psyche and the support for his approach to internal and foreign policy. Specifically, Russia has experienced multiple cycles of expansion and contraction since the time of Kievan Rus. From then, there was an expansion during the reign of Vladimir the Great that was followed by a gradual decline that culminated in the attack by Tatars in the 1240s. The small principality of Muscovy survived this onslaught and thrived over the next 200 years in the northern forests, content to be tax collectors for the Tatars, and far away from their main strongholds. It took its greatest initial steps outward under Ivan the Terrible (1547-84) but that expansion was almost immediately followed by external attacks and the massive contraction of the early 17^th century during the Time of Troubles.

After a gradual stabilizing of the kingdom, Peter the Great (1694-1725) in the early 18^th century pushed toward the northwest, southeast, and into Siberia. The lull of mid-eighteenth century was followed later in the century by Catherine the Great’s push southward and westward. In the 19^th century, Alexander I (1801-25) incorporated Finland and Nicolas I moved toward the Caucasus and Central Asia. These successes were followed by the contraction during WWI. The Soviet Union recovered many of these territories only to lose them at the outset of WWII. Stalin (1924-53) then used this war to move further into Eastern Europe, only for this territory to be lost in the contraction after the Soviet Union’s collapse.

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Putin and other Russians felt betrayed when the West did not live up to President George H.W. Bush’s promise to Mikhail S. Gorbachev that the former Soviet dominated areas in Eastern Europe joining NATO would not mean U.S. and other western troops would not be moved to the Russian frontier. One could argue that Putin’s attacks in Georgia and South Ossetia, and then in Ukraine voided this promise.

Past Russian rulers succeeded in three major ways: One, through internal administrative, military, economic, and religious reforms. Two, through internal oppression of opposition by nobles, military and secret police, provincial leaders and oligarchs and, more recently, dissident voices. Three, though external diplomatic and military initiatives.

Confluences

Putin’s childhood experiences of swaddling, beating, and shaming were not unlike those of most of his contemporaries. He wanted and continues to want, like others, to escape from this past and yet repeats it on a personal and familial level. All the while, there is admiration for those who escape these fetters and rise to positions of influence. Thus his efforts to reach the top of the society and to be in charge are demonstrated by showing himself as heroic, strong, on horseback, bare-chested, shooting bow and arrow, and associating with rough gangs, etc. These seemingly outrageous behaviors fit the image of himself as having overcome his restraints and thus an encouragement to others to do the same. In his eyes these are positive ways to escape the burdens of the past and he places it, even if he does not himself always follow it, counter to escaping alcohol and abuse.

Putin’s understanding of Russia’s past, including the rather immediate and horrific events of WWII and more specifically those of Leningrad (St. Petersburg), overlap with the collective Russian experience. His general education reinforced the understanding of the successes and failures of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, all of which was enhanced by KGB training. Thus, he was indoctrinated to the governing cycles of internal reforms, manipulation, expansion, and oppression of internal opposition.

Russians generally approve of Putin’s efforts to resurrect the glorious past with which they associate themselves. As a group, they see their nation as having been a world power, one not pushed around by foreign leaders and nations. They resent President

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Obama’s recent statement that Russia has become no more than a regional power. Because of the collective desire for Russians to ward off such impressions and to assert their perception of Russia as a great nation, they accept the current hardships in the assumption that their suffering will lead to the desired result. They are also willing to support and participate in the tools Russian leaders have used in the past including oppression, deprivation, diplomacy, and warfare.

No one who has carefully studied Russian history, from child-rearing to war-making, should be surprised that Putin tries to reconquer lost territories in the Caucasus, the Crimea and Ukraine, and finally attempt to control the outcome in Syria and search for oil in the Arctic. As Supreme Commander of Russian forces and interests, as he understands it, Putin is doing no more than fulfilling his own and Russia’s destiny to be free to explore the full extent of its greatness.

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