Russia in Ukraine: The social sciences,war,and democracy

The legacy of communism

True Communism collapsed in the 1980s, but the long-lasting impact of this collapse, of which there are two main elements, is still felt in Russia today.

First, huge fortunes were created within the country for several hundred oligarchs, but also for tens of thousands of entrepreneurs who, although less powerful, were able to enrich themselves by exploiting Communism’s collapse, appropriating the wealth of its failed economy. An even larger group, the well-off middle class, found itself at home in a market that was to a certain extent uncontrolled, and in the modern culture of consumption and business. From the 1990s onward, a class of new businessmen and company directors was born, the majority of whom were the product of the Soviet system. From research that I conducted at the time on the ground with Alexis Berelowitch (1996) and several Russian colleagues, we ascertained that many of the newly wealthy and the new entrepreneurs were former Party-State elites. The newly rich had previously belonged to the nomenklatura and so were particularly well-placed to take over both the means of production and production itself, while the entrepreneurs had a real appetite for business and had all been members of the Komsomol, the Communist youth organization created in 1918. The most powerful, the oligarchs, are directly dependent on the Kremlin, which they serve zealously in exchange for the chance to accumulate immense fortunes that, for some, amount to billions of dollars.

The second consequence of the collapse of the USSR was that, of the Party-State, what remained was above all a repressive military apparatus, an impressive nuclear arsenal, and the secret police, including the intelligence service that produced Vladimir Putin.

The Communist ideology that had, from 1917 onward, mobilized at least part of the population and intelligentsia, first effectively and then in an increasingly abstract and fictitious manner, has practically disappeared, and the regime has built an entirely different relationship with society. Although during the occupation of Crimea in 2014 the regime benefited from great popular support, it does not seem to be able to rely in any particular capacity on the society, which is dynamic and constantly evolving. Instead, it seems to attempt to indoctrinate society with patriotism and continue to manipulate it by means of untruthful propaganda based on flimsy ideology, as we will see further on. Today, the regime is dressing up its war as a “special military operation” and terrorizing anyone who calls for democracy, forbidding protest marches, dissolving the NGO Memorial (which promoted human rights and remembrance of Soviet crimes), assassinating or imprisoning its opponents, gagging the media, and so on.

Although Communism was originally above all a social ideology, and although it promised, in the words of Karl Marx, “to each according to his needs” in terms of income, access to work, education, health care, leisure, consumption, and so on the national question was nevertheless a perpetual thorn in its side. Thus, the regime and Stalin embarked upon a pitiless “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign—in other words, an attack on Jewish people—a conflict that was also a ringing patriotic call to the Russian nation. This nationalist legacy, which today is a rare vibrant note in what remains of Communism, in fact predates Communism, with historical sources that begin well before the October Revolution of 1917.

From the mid-1990s, nationalist sentiments, already embedded within Soviet ideology and originating in a more distant past, started to harden, glorified by propaganda. After Gorbachev—a figure today held in contempt—ushered in perestroika, the new ideology that rapidly gained ground therefore began to focus on patriotism.

True Communism thus bequeathed to Russia a system with power at its center, around which moneyed interests, propaganda methods, nationalism, and police and military forces were built. Its promise to provide a brighter future, “tomorrows that sing,” had lost all credibility well before the collapse.

Beyond Russia, Communism has met the same fate, collapsing in the countries where it had a foothold and thus depriving Vladimir Putin of the support his predecessors enjoyed during the Cold War. Its capacity to mobilize has disappeared. It is not by chance that the few regimes that support Putin are not Communist powers, but rather dictatorial or despotic regimes such as the murderous dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad in Syria or the authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela.

It would therefore be too superficial to compare Putin to Hitler, at least in terms of their relationship with the population: Nazism was a powerful movement capable of galvanizing the masses. Although Putin, in contrast to the images frequently presented in the media, is not completely out of touch, and although he remains fairly popular, with approval ratings peaking during the annexation of Crimea, reaching 70%, his connection to the Russian population is fragile. Support for him is based not on a desire to see new expansionist goals achieved but rather on the fact that Putin has imposed order and reconciled the country with its Soviet past; it is insufficient to mobilize belligerent, fevered, or hateful masses behind him.

Comparable, if less acute, phenomena can be seen in the former so-called people’s democracies, in Poland or Hungary where, like in Russia, nationalism predates Communism. The point of difference is that the concept of the Russian nation is associated with the idea of empire, first the empire of the czars and then that of the Soviets.

The two faces of identity: Open and closed

To understand the brutality of Putin’s war in Ukraine, we must start with identity. As Michel Foucher (2022), who has the advantage of being both geographer and diplomat, explains, for the autocrat it is crucial to re-establish the Russian Empire, not in the image of the Soviet Union but instead as the Russian World. For Putin, this means enabling all Russians to live in the same geopolitical and political entity. His goal is to reunite in particular those living within “the three Russias of which the czar was emperor: Great Russia, White Russia (Belarus), and Malorossiya, Little Russia (Ukraine),” the situation being different for other countries that are home to Russian minorities. Here, we can see at least one point of comparison with Hitler, in that the führer was concerned with ethnic German populations, the Volksdeutsche, and developed a policy of Pan-German territorial expansion that took its first step with the annexation of Sudetenland in 1938.

As identity-based politics surge around the world, Putin is, in the end, part of a wider trend. He tells a largely mythical national narrative that absorbs Ukraine’s identity into Russia and, given that Russia is no longer a major economic power, employs the towering military might of the country to promote this nationalist project.

In response to the brutalization of the country by Russian troops—and to the apparent surprise of Vladimir Putin, who expected a warm welcome and a blitzkrieg of a war—Ukraine is resisting and its national identity is growing in strength, even being formed in some respects. It is achieving this thanks to a population that is profoundly attached to the rule of law and its institutions and that has had decisive democratic aspirations since before the Russian invasion. Ukraine’s revolution, sometimes called the Revolution of Dignity, took place in February 2014, though it should be noted that Ukraine is not free of corruption and also has a number of its own oligarchs. In the end, even European identity may emerge from this war reinforced; already we see how the twenty-seven European Union member states are taking collective action against Putin.

This situation reminds us that identities have two dimensions, one closed—an extreme version of which is embodied by Putin—and the other open, now epitomized by the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Those in the West who wish to tread carefully with Putin often have pacifist ulterior motives; this was one of the raisons d'être of the Mouvement de la Paix, which in reality served as a stepping stone or fig leaf for Communism in the 1950s and 1960s. However, those same individuals may also share Putin’s vision of national identity. This is one of the reasons why the war in Ukraine disconcerts the far ends of the political spectrum, as seen in the French presidential election campaign, unfolding at the same time as the war in the spring of 2022. Anyone who supports the rule of law and institutions, or indeed democracy, even if they are politically radicalized, cannot stand with those who dream of an authoritarian regime espousing a pure, hardline nationalist ideology and who only recently were expressing their admiration for, friendship, or agreement with Vladimir Putin.

In Russia as elsewhere, this type of nationalism requires a national narrative that is always, to varying degrees, fallacious. Those who espouse this kind of national narrative are never bothered by the errors or omissions it contains nor the distorted version of historical reality it presents, yet at the same time, they feel the need to invoke history. They value not the truth but rather the legitimacy provided by a reconstructed history that glorifies the nation. It is worth noting here that Ukraine too has its mythologized national narrative, which depicts Russia as the invader at a point in time when, in fact, Ukraine was embroiled in a civil war that also inflamed Russia. It should also be noted that recent Ukrainian domestic policy has contributed to the separatism of the eastern part of the country, for example, when the government banned Russian as the second official language in 2014. However, these points are immaterial to the current Russian invasion.

Today, the concept of the nation in Ukraine is attached to that of democracy. This presents an important lesson: national identities can veer toward the worst, as we see with Vladimir Putin, but they can also represent the best, as shown by Volodymyr Zelensky. They therefore cannot be simply said to oppose or support the universal values of reason and rule of law.

Critique of the Russian national narrative

We must, therefore, call upon historians when contending with those who distort history. Historians can and should listen to the accounts, but also distrust them, and cross-reference the available statements, evidence, and documents before exposing, where they exist, any falsehoods in the narratives.

The national narrative that Putin offers should be carefully examined. It is not new; he used it before, when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Nor are all elements of the narrative necessarily false. It calls for the “denazification” of the Ukrainian State citing how, during the Second World War, many Ukrainians fought for the Nazi cause, motivated by anti-Communist feeling, by anti-Semitism, by a desire for independence or Ukrainian nationalism, or by some combination of these. Today, extreme-right groups do exist in Ukraine, in the east of the country, which either support Putin or at the very least do not oppose him, as well as Ukrainian nationalists, including within the regular army, where the Azov battalion was first formed on the initiative of the white supremacist Andriy Biletsky. However, Putin’s justification becomes delusional when he evokes the “genocide” of Russian speakers, in particular in the Donbas region. His rewriting of history is altogether unacceptable. Ukraine is not in the hands of Nazis; it is a democracy.

When this rewriting is used to support a widespread brutalization of the country, ² it becomes necessary to examine not just its falsity but also its role in unleashing this war. The rewriting of history not only contradicts basic historical reality, it also feeds the nationalist urges of the Russian people. In this case however, it has not incited a real movement or strong support for Putin’s belligerent foreign policy, nor has it allowed him to recruit the population en masse or find support in Ukraine outside of the few eastern territories Russia has taken, where in fact the people have been less ardent in their Russophilia than Putin expected. It works by exploiting certain fragility in the relationship between power and the people, which operates through two main connections, both real but tenuous and contradictory in some ways.

The first connection is not just with the oligarchs but with everyone who grabbed the resources left behind as the Soviet economy was disassembled, who went into business, set up a firm or a service company, or who adopted with any success the ideologies and practices of ostentatious consumerism. It is those people who are being destabilized by the financial sanctions that are damaging the Russian banking and monetary system. Their dependence on Putin, who treats them with contempt and rules them through fear, does not help the regime’s stability.

The second connection is with a working-class section of the country that still feels slighted by its lost glory, and which jealously guards the memory of the Second World War. Putin’s Russia has not broken with this past, which was exalted ad nauseam for foreign observers during the Communist era; it has not moved on from this period of history, which television programs continue to revisit, and the categories employed to remember it remain unchanged. Evoking “denazification” directly recalls this period. This section of the population is also responsive to an anti-Western rhetoric, which reminds them of the greatness that Russia has lost since the end of the Cold War. It is no accident that, according to Putin’s propaganda, the West is again trying to make Russia suffer by harming its economy.

This second population could be compared to Donald Trump’s electorate in terms of their resentment, obsessive fear of losing social status and seeing the nation decline, and nostalgia for the empire and its greatness. There are, however, at least two points of difference. First, they have not been turned into an electoral force. Second, if they feel threatened then it is from the outside and in political terms, whereas Trump was able to play on the issue of race and anti-Black racism internally, while simultaneously attacking Mexican immigration. For the most part, they also lack the scapegoat classically provided by Jewish people in the past (let us not forget that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published for the first time in 1903, was written for the czar). Large numbers of Russia’s Jews have, for the past 30 years, emigrated to Israel, a country with which Russia has significant and complex relations and that has not, to date, declared itself totally opposed to Putin’s actions. It should be noted that Putin himself shows no trace of anti-Semitism.

The connection with the economically comfortable or wealthy sections of society, at the crossroads of money and political power, is therefore fragile, while the connection with the nationalist sections of the population, nostalgic for the empire, has not translated into real mobilizing capacity, at least to date. Moreover, by sanctioning the oligarchs to weaken Putin, the West will also harm the population at large, all the while claiming to wish to protect them. It is certainly premature to form any conclusions about action taken by the West, but it is clear that Putin is attempting to build a nationalist argument on the back of Western measures. Will the economic crisis that results from these sanctions serve to alienate the population from Putin, who will use the sanctions as an argument to justify his policies? It is even more difficult to answer this type of question as we have little solid evidence of where Russian opinion lies due to the lack of any suitable and reliable opinion polls or other tools to study it. Gone is the age when Yuri Levada, the great lost sociologist who gave his name to the center he founded, produced vast, reliable surveys on the opinions and forms of Russian society. Today, although the Levada Center still exists, it is patently unable to survey the population’s feelings about a war that it is banned from referring to as such.

Loss of meaning, ideology, and myth

Could the instability of Putin’s social and political base be contributing to his process of disassociation, in which meaning is lost, thus radicalizing his discourse justifying war? Two dimensions need to be discussed here: ideology and myth.

Ideology or, in the words of Hannah Arendt, the pursuit of an idea, constitutes the first step toward a loss of meaning and toward increasingly unrestrained violence. The more disconnected this pursuit is from the realities that it wants to transform through action, the less the person who acts is in step with the expectations of those on whose behalf he wields power; the less able he is to represent a nation (or any other community of reference); and the more his discourse falters as he resorts to violence with ever fewer limits. This violence can just as easily be directed outward—in the form of a war, in this case—as it can inward—here, as internal repression.

In processes of this type, where an all-powerful actor does not sufficiently engage with the population he claims to represent, an ideology quickly combines, in various ways, with self-referencing violence that has no limits other than the resistance it meets in the field. History shows us that the discourse can at this point start to seem like an incomprehensible logorrhea (as eventually occurred with the Italian Red Brigades), a sectarian repetition of the same slogans or incantatory, indecisive words. When terrorists speak in the name of a working class or of a nation that does not recognize itself at all in their murderous excesses, violence becomes limitless because it is waged in an entirely artificial manner on behalf of an invoked population that has not been consulted and has nothing to do with it. We are not at that point yet, but there is cause for concern.

As Jean-Pierre Faye (1972) and Victor Klemperer (2006) taught us in relation to Nazism, vocabulary is important, as is the way in which words create a narrative. However, with Putin, we must consider if words are an appropriate and effective tool, and if it will be difficult for him to maintain a discourse that the population can accept as realistic in the long term. It is too early to form a definitive point of view. It is, however, possible to form the hypothesis that Putin has committed to a trajectory that involves a loss of meaning and that he will therefore find it increasingly difficult to maintain a meaningful connection with those he is supposed to represent or embody.

His difficulties are exacerbated because the only organs available to mediate between the regime and the people are the media and social networks, on the condition that they submit to an effective control. Autocracy was able to take hold in Russia in part due to the disintegration of the intermediary bodies and in part because of the inability to build new ones in the aftermath of perestroika. There is an important lesson here: We should be wary of regimes that hold in contempt, bypass, discredit, or simply neglect these intermediary bodies, parties, unions, associations, and autonomous institutions.

The second step toward a loss of meaning, here somewhat interwoven with the first, is the inability of a myth to continue to function. The purpose of a mythical narrative is to solve in an imaginary manner something that in reality proves highly contradictory. Where ideology proposes an idea, myth proposes solutions to contradictions. Yet what can we observe here? Putin wrongly believed that he could quickly and easily settle the question of Ukraine by invading the country, employing only a “special operation” that should have been rapid and relatively easy, but this mythical discourse has been undone.

How can he continue to boast of a pan-Russian struggle in which Ukrainians are members of the national Russian community, while attacking the entirety of Ukrainian society with considerable violence, unconcerned about sparing civilians, indeed quite the opposite? How can he crush a sister nation in the name of this kinship and bomb cities including Kyiv—the birthplace of Russia in the nation’s founding narratives, to which he likes to refer—on the pretext of integrating it fully, for its own good? Kyiv, which school children are taught is the mother of all Russian cities, is not Grozny. Ukraine emancipated itself, but does this give Putin the right to mistreat a member of Russia’s own family in such a violent manner? Beyond the lies and the attempts to manipulate public opinion, beyond, therefore, the instrumental use of resources to support the recourse to violence, the dissemination of a mythical narrative is colliding with a reality that resists, that is, with the Ukrainian population, their leaders, and a powerful collective conscience that demonstrates the inanity of the myth. This myth can no longer continue to function except in the framework of the now surreal discourse, and only when carried by the violence of bombs and missiles.

In both cases, ideology and myth, there is a link between the discourse and the practice of war that suggests the beginning of a loss of meaning, a disconnection from reality. As the war becomes more murderous, as the violence that is brutalizing Ukraine increasingly resembles that which Putin employed in Chechnya, and the more brazen and less credible the propaganda becomes, the more it means that the ideology is cracking and the myth is unraveling. How far will Putin go down these paths of loss of meaning? It is impossible to say but we can, at least, ask the question.

Politics and psychiatry

The violence of the war has prompted some in the media to describe Putin in pathological terms, painting him as an entirely out-of-touch figure who has lost all contact with his society, his elites—apart from the few who are close to him and who themselves are cut off from real life in the country—and the outside world, and as acting in a paranoid and megalomaniacal fashion, two behaviors that often go hand in hand.

Sociology still resists explaining social issues through psychiatric disorders, even if these appear to have been present since the beginning of the trajectory of the person concerned. My work on terrorism, including research conducted on the ground, has convinced me that it is far more common for an actor’s madness to appear at the end of their arc rather than the beginning. Years of secrecy and closeting oneself within ever-smaller groups create singular personalities. That does not, of course, preclude there being certain susceptibility from the start.

With Putin, it is possible to piece together large sections of his life story and analyze the conditions that enabled a person like him to enter and then stay in politics. We must consider his trajectory and the way he was able to chart his course through the deconstruction of the USSR and its regime. He must have had, from the start, a singular personality, capable of violence and brutality. His adolescence and later entry into the KGB have been described in the press, and Putin himself talked about those years in interviews with journalists, published in 2000. ³ These accounts portray him as a bully, capable of holding his own in chaotic circumstances and hellish environments. It is paradoxical that the man who reached the top owes his rise to the breakdown of a system that he embodies certain nostalgia for. Indeed, he seems to dream of rebuilding the Russian World with a highly strategic buffer zone around it, formed by countries that are either under its thumb or pose no risk of causing him serious problems. Perhaps, one day, Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan will receive the same treatment as Ukraine or Belarus.

The Putin of 2022 is certainly not the Putin of the 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s. He has changed considerably, if not in terms of the structure of his personality, then at least in his political and geopolitical attitudes. To understand his behavior within Russia—multiple documents portray his relationship with those close to him as particularly appalling and he manages the population through propaganda and repression—and indeed his behavior in relation to international or geopolitical matters, we need to consider the international context since the 1990s, before turning to psychiatry.

During the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Russians in general and Putin personally experienced a raw feeling of humiliation combined with a fear of encirclement—a terror that has plagued Russia for centuries. The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact was not mirrored by a symmetrical elimination of NATO, quite the opposite. Did the victors of the Cold War sufficiently understand the strength of this feeling of encirclement and contempt? In some ways it resembled how the Germans felt after the First World War, faced with the Treaty of Versailles, a feeling that undoubtedly contributed to the rise of Nazism. The purpose of this article is not to analyze the recent history of relations between the United States, NATO, Europe, and Russia, but we can reasonably assume that all the blame do not lie on one side. Clearly, these points do not exonerate Putin, but they do suggest that his bellicose policy is not solely a product of his personality, rather that it also springs from the resentment of troubled and humiliated people.

Putin has certainly changed since the 2010s, when he seemed more like a steady hand at the heart of power, a primus inter pares. Now though, with no active, dynamic popular movement to support him, he prefers to use intimidation and terror, repressing all protest without nuance and relying on crudely dishonest propaganda. Today, as an absolute leader, he acts without submitting his schemes, plans, or policies for debate, and in the recent period, according to most available accounts, he rarely even consults those close to him. If we were to draw a parallel, it could be with how Stalin changed in the 1930s.

The violence unleashed on Ukraine has no connection to any serious expectations or any particular thirst for popular action either in Russia or Ukraine. It cannot be linked to religion or race, as were other Russian military campaigns, such as the war in Chechnya, nor claim to be settling any historical scores. On the contrary, the two populations are said to be siblings in many regards. Can it be halted by negotiation or diplomacy? Or must we believe that it can only be brought to an end when the instigator of the violence is broken by force, repression, resounding defeat, or his own death? We will only know after the fact, when events allow us to pause to reconsider, armed with the necessary knowledge, the historical process they brought to an end.

The current situation presents a paradox. War, even an asymmetrical one, is the continuation of politics by other means, as Carl von Clausewitz famously put it. All the efforts to achieve peace, via the defeat of one of the parties or negotiation, seek a return to politics, that is, to the setting aside of violence. However, the situation is different when the violence has the potential to be limitless. In this case, the only possible endpoint is the removal from power of the instigator. This may be by death in combat, when that actor has become desperate and a negotiated solution seems impossible, or by suicide when he comes to understand the inevitability of defeat, as was the case with Hitler in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945. Given that Putin has already waded so deep into brutality in this war, would he be able to accept a peaceful resolution to the conflict and a return to politics, or geopolitics? Having been left by the Western powers to develop his strategy, with no real opposition, particularly in Crimea and in his support for Hafez al-Assad, he has demonstrated no restraint in his actions in Ukraine. The West also bears some responsibility for what Putin may have felt seeing his country partially scorned after the fall of the USSR. Has he passed the point of no return? Is he on the verge of achieving his goals, despite what many observers say? Has he perhaps created a chronic situation, a mix of Russian domination and Ukrainian resistance? Has he lost his war? History will decide.

We should remember, however, that the strategic decisions taken in response must be based on realistic hypotheses. One of the most harrowing aspects of the war in Ukraine is that in order to oppose it, the Western powers, both the United States and the countries of Europe, must day after day gamble on just how adrift Putin has become.

Suspension of democracy

The peculiarity of a war like this is that it seems to pit democracy and autocracy against one another—peace, law, and truth against violence, lawlessness, and lies or media manipulation. Let us not delude ourselves, however. The democracies of Europe and the United States are anything but perfect, permitting corruption, inequality before the law, and authoritarian tendencies to flourish. In some places, they are becoming illiberal, though not yet as blatantly as in Hungary and Poland, and are home to national populist or extremist currents that are capable of mobilizing entire swathes of the electorate. Moreover, large sectors of society in these countries, despite being capable of humanity and compassion, are first and foremost concerned with economic issues, inflation, and the cost of energy.

By taking Ukraine’s side, the countries that most actively support it are not presenting their democratic faces; rather they have suspended their democratic lives in favor of a push for social unity. It is Ukrainian democracy that concerns them, not their own, and that has led them to put national unity before the disagreements that divide society and that require democratic discussion. In France, for example, the campaign for the April 2022 presidential election, mediocre and unexciting from the outset, became even duller as other candidates struggled to criticize the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron, who, as the foremost head of State to maintain a real personal line of communication with Putin, presented himself as, and indeed appeared to be, above the electoral scrum.

The international defense of democracy therefore does not necessarily mean it is being fought for within a country’s own national space. However, it strengthens social unity to help those elsewhere who wish to maintain their laws and their capacity to recognize their pluralism, be it political, social, cultural, religious, or other, and to deal with that pluralism without violence. We can no longer disassociate the internal from the external, public policy from geopolitical strategy. The fight for democracy is waged on a global stage despite the national dimensions inherent in it.

Translated by Cadenza Academic Translations.