Vladimir Putin, Russia’s resentful leader, takes the world to war

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s resentful leader, takes the world to war

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Growing up in a communal apartment in Leningrad, a young Vladimir Putin liked to chase rats across the stairwell with sticks. One day, he spotted a particularly huge rat and drove it into a corner. Suddenly, it threw itself at him, trying to leap onto Putin’s head in its bid to escape.

The incident taught Russia’s president a lesson he carried for decades. “Everyone should keep this in mind. You should never drive anyone into a corner,” he said.

On Thursday, Putin ordered his army to attack Ukraine from the north, south and east in what could be the largest military operation in Europe since the end of the second world war.

Despite months of western warnings about his plans for a brazen assault, Putin framed the invasion as a defensive operation — even going so far as to cite the relevant UN charter article — and claimed that Russia had “been left no chance to act otherwise”.

His war in Ukraine marks the culmination of a slide into a paranoid autocracy that earns comparison with Russia’s most brutal rulers.

Already a distant figure before the pandemic, the lengths the former KGB officer takes to avoid coronavirus have limited his human contact. Western visitors are forced to sit around a comically huge table. Allies toast champagne from opposite ends of a massive carpet. Even Putin’s closest advisers are rarely allowed to come within 10 feet without weeks of quarantine and testing.

People who have known him for decades say this has deepened a pent-up resentment of the west and a fixation on Russia’s shared history with Ukraine — making him more aggressive and unpredictable than ever.

“He’s even more isolated than Stalin,” says Gleb Pavlovsky, a former adviser. “In the last years of his life, Stalin didn’t come to the Kremlin and lived in his dacha, but the politburo came to see him and they talked and drank. Putin doesn’t have that. He’s as isolated as he can be. And in that situation rational issues become irrational.”

A romanticised ideal of serving his country drew Putin, 69, to join KGB counter-intelligence in the late 1970s. Before long, however, he was confronted with the Soviet Union’s long, dreary slide into collapse. Deployed to Dresden in East Germany, he watched helplessly as communist regimes in eastern Europe fell while nationalist movements at home pushed Mikhail Gorbachev to open up the country.

One night shortly after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Putin emerged from KGB headquarters to face an angry mob, then asked a nearby Soviet unit for support. The answer haunted him for years. “‘We can do nothing without an order from Moscow. And Moscow is silent’,” he recalled. “I had the feeling the country was no more. It was clear the Union was sick with a deathly, incurable disease called the paralysis of power.”

Back in Russia, Putin left the KGB and quickly rose up the ranks as a trusted aide to Russia’s two most important democratic leaders — St Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak and Boris Yeltsin, its first president.

Once Yeltsin unexpectedly named Putin his successor on New Year’s Eve in 1999, Putin strove to restore the power Russia had lost. At home, he launched a brutal campaign to subdue separatists in Chechnya, brought the media to heel and defanged the country’s oligarchs. But abroad, he initially sought to ally with the US, asking Bill Clinton if Russia could ever join Nato and offering his support for George W Bush’s war on terror after the 9/11 attacks.

“He basically wanted to be like a vice-chairman of the board,” says Samuel Charap, a political scientist at the Rand Corporation. “You don’t have to . . . change your fisheries code to match what Brussels tell you — you get a seat at the big boys’ table.”

Putin’s entreaties fell on deaf ears, leaving him embittered at what he saw as the west’s refusal to take him seriously, according to a former senior Russian official. “It’s their fault. They should have supported us and integrated us into the world, but they worked against us.”

Key turning points came in 2003 and 2004. Putin jailed Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, while growing increasingly resentful of the US for the Iraq war, Nato’s expansion into eastern Europe and its support for “colour revolutions” in former Soviet states. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where protests overturned a Moscow-backed candidate’s fraudulent election victory, was a particularly sore point.

“The fear of losing the post-Soviet space to Nato expansion became tied up with the fear of losing his own power,” says Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Gradually, a revanchist side began to emerge. Former aides to Mikheil Saakashvili, the leader of the “colour revolution” in Georgia, suspected something was wrong when Putin complained about Tbilisi’s “museum of Russian occupation” at a meeting in 2007 and reminded him of fellow Georgians like Stalin and Beria who had sat at the heights of Soviet power.

Saakashvili joked: “Why don’t you open a museum of Georgian occupation in the Kremlin?” His aides gasped in horror at Putin’s stony reaction.

Putin’s resentment of the US and Nato came to the fore when Ukraine and Georgia applied to join the alliance in 2008. He warned Bush that Ukraine was “not even a real state”, according to a Russian account. Though Nato offered only a vague assurance the countries would eventually join the alliance, it was enough to prompt the then prime minister to launch a devastating five-day war against Georgia and send troops to occupy two breakaway border regions.

But the muted western reaction, followed by a US attempt to reset ties with Russia, meant Putin’s use of force “was not addressed decisively enough”, says Kadri Liik, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “And that created a situation where things got worse and worse and worse.”

Fears of western encroachment and domestic uprising became intertwined in Putin’s mind. In December 2011 he accused the US of “giving the signal” for protests preceding his return to the presidency, then described the 2014 revolution in Ukraine as an “armed coup”, prompting him to seize the Crimean peninsula.

This severely damaged Russia’s global standing but Putin’s approval ratings at home soared above 80 per cent. With little meaningful opposition, his appetite for adventurism grew — culminating in a 2015 military intervention that turned the tide of the Syrian civil war.

“Putin’s used to being lucky. That’s very dangerous for a gambler, because he starts believing fate is on his side,” Pavlovsky says. “When you play Russian roulette, you feel that God is on your side until the shot rings out.”

As Putin’s circle became more limited, the picture of the world he received became more distorted. He and his confidants would increasingly spout bizarre conspiracy theories that the west was bent on destroying Russia through everything from gay marriage to anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny.

“You eventually end up in a trap, because your inner circle tries to only tell you good news and what fits your views. Imagine Putin discussing the war in Ukraine with his generals — they’ll rapturously cry, ‘Yes, we can!’ Nobody will resist,” Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the R.Politik analysis firm, says.

Western countries found negotiating with an overconfident, isolated Putin impossible. Talks over the Donbas conflict, brokered by France and Germany, stalled.

Ukraine then elected a new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who took a bolder stance against Putin: the former comedian demanded Nato admit Kyiv and had Putin’s closest ally there arrested.

“Russia’s political regime is this mafia-type state where letting insults drop means the leader loses his authority,” says Nikolai Petrov, a fellow at Chatham House. “There’s no way you can wipe that clean.”

As the peace process deteriorated, Putin’s resentments of Ukraine and Nato spilled into the open. Last summer, he published 5,000 words casting aspersion on Ukraine’s right to exist in its current form and claiming the US was using it to threaten Moscow.

Then, as Russia began massing troops on the border, Putin told diplomats to maintain “a certain tension” with the west. His demands that Nato pledge never to admit Ukraine and roll back the alliance’s eastern expansion would have rewritten the post-cold war security order.

The west mounted last-minute diplomatic efforts. But when France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz met Putin around the huge Kremlin table, they were subjected to historical rants by a man who struck them as almost totally at odds with the outside world, according to aides.

Their missions were doomed to fail. A day after agreeing to a Macron-brokered summit with the US, Putin recognised the Donbas separatists’ independence in a rambling tirade in which he threatened to hold Ukraine responsible for any “ensuing bloodshed”. It was a clear attempt to prepare Russia’s population for war against the “brotherly nation” of Ukraine — whose very existence in its current form, he claimed, was an existential threat.

“At some point he didn’t think he had been driven into a corner so much as that he could get out of the corner. What did he have to be afraid of?” Stanovaya says. “He realised an aggressive, frightening Russia is an effective way to make the world start taking you seriously.”

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The continuing war against Liz Cheney

The continuing war against Liz Cheney

By Matthew Green

Safe incumbents aren't usually featured on bulletin boards like this.

As a rule, leaders in Congress don’t endorse challengers against incumbents in their own party. It violates one of their core duties, to help their colleagues get reelected. And it can easily backfire: if the incumbent gets reelected anyway, she can make life difficult for those leaders and make their endorsements look worthless.

Yet last week, two leaders of the House Republican Party did exactly that. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told The Federalist that he stood behind Harriet Hageman, one of several Republicans challenging Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) for the GOP nomination. Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) soon followed, endorsing Hageman in a remarkable statement that called Cheney a “Far-Left Pelosi puppet.”

If McCarthy and Stefanik were going to target anyone in their party, Cheney was the safest bet, politically speaking. When Cheney was chair of the Conference, her repeated criticisms of Trump put House Republicans in a tough spot with their pro-Trump constituents, and they voted to replace her with Stefanik. Four months later, Pelosi appointed Cheney to the select committee investigating the January 6th attacks on the U.S. Capitol, a move that angered many conservatives who saw it as an act of treachery. In addition, Cheney herself had once supported a primary challenger to an incumbent (though the incumbent, Tom Massie (R-KY), isn’t exactly the most loyal Republican himself).

Still, endorsing Hageman was highly unorthodox and potentially risky. So why did McCarthy and Stefanik do it?

If they hoped to persuade Wyoming voters, they are likely to be disappointed. Political science research has found that endorsements by parties and party leaders can affect vote share in elections, but the effect is modest and contingent on many factors, such as the quality of the candidates. By themselves, these two endorsements probably won’t sway many primary voters. McCarthy is unknown to much of the public, and those who do recognize his name tend to view him unfavorably.

Another possibility is that McCarthy and Stefanik intended to scare would-be Cheney donors who want to stay McCarthy’s good graces. This could be why their endorsements came now, just a few weeks after Cheney reported raising record sums and boasted nearly $5 million in her campaign coffers, twelve times what Hageman has. But with so much money in the bank, Cheney won’t be hurt if donations to her campaign slow down.

A third possibility is that the endorsements were directed not at voters or donors but at other Republicans running against Cheney. As long as those candidates stay in the race, there’s a real danger that they split the anti-Cheney vote. Seeing that powerful GOP leaders are against them, perhaps they will withdraw, leaving Hageman as the sole candidate representing Republicans who want to remove Cheney.

But the most likely reason that Stefanik and McCarthy have stuck their neck out for Hageman is to placate Donald Trump. As Seth Masket predicted over a year ago, GOP leaders have been assiduously courting Trump, believing that only he can decide whether his strongest supporters -- working class whites -- turn out to vote. This gives the former president outsized leverage over what those leaders do. And Trump has it out for Cheney, who voted to impeach him and who has repeatedly attacked Trump for falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen.

Trump also has a small cadre of aggressive followers in Congress, consisting mostly of the House Freedom Caucus, who have been pushing McCarthy for months to kick Cheney out of the Republican Conference. McCarthy and Stefanik may be listening them, too, especially since they consider themselves kingmakers in their party. Stefanik felt she had to placate the Freedom Caucus to be elected Conference Chair, for example, and Freedom Caucus members have periodically threatened to kick McCarthy out of leadership.

These unusual endorsements of Cheney’s opponent, then, tell us two bigger things about the state of the GOP today. First, the Republican Party remains deeply divided, not over policy differences (as is usually the case for intraparty divisions) but over the Party’s very identity. Is the GOP about a shared set of policy goals and ideological commitments, or is it about one man and his personal grievances?

Second, the endorsements can be seen as a sign not of Trump’s strength but of his weakness. He dominates the Republican Party – certainly enough to scare two House leaders into making a risky and possibly pointless endorsement. But why pressure two House minority party leaders to support Hageman if she weren’t already likely to beat Cheney?

Those endorsements were only the latest effort by Trump and his acolytes to punish the Wyoming congresswoman. The tremendous amount of effort being deployed against her – the RNC’s censure motion, the state party refusing to acknowledge that Cheney is a Republican, Trump trying to get Wyoming to change its balloting law so Democrats can’t vote for Cheney in the primary – hints at desperation.

Importantly, Cheney is hardly alone among Republicans who are pushing back against a Trump-centered GOP. She is joined by Senate Republicans (including the highest ranked Republican in national office, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)) and dozens of former White House staffers and members of Congress. Members of this wing of the Party threatened to leave the GOP last year and sharply criticized the Republican National Committee’s badly-worded censure motion against Cheney (and against Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, another GOP congressman who joined the January 6 committee). Anti-Trump Republicans have also organized a conference in DC this weekend.

To be sure, Cheney could easily lose her primary. Her opposition to Trump is unpopular with Republican voters, who still largely support the president (though that support has started to weaken somewhat). But even if Cheney leaves Congress, others in the anti-Trump wing of the GOP will remain, and McCarthy and Stefanik will continue to be pressured by Trump to combat them. Expect the internecine conflict to continue.

GOP humoring of Trump’s praise of Putin sinks to absurd new lows

GOP humoring of Trump’s praise of Putin sinks to absurd new lows

Greg Sargent — Read time: 4 minutes

The invasion of Ukraine has presented Republicans with a vexing conundrum. How can they express horror and condemnation — which no doubt are sincerely felt — over Vladimir Putin’s actions while avoiding taking a position on Donald Trump’s praise of the Russian leader, let alone on Trump’s long history of kowtowing to him?

The solutions Republicans have hatched to this problem usefully illuminate the range of acceptable opinion in the party, and the constraints on it, at a moment when many Republicans still see Trump as essential to the party’s future.

The Post has a remarkable new overview of quotes from Republicans about the situation. The story is essentially that Trump’s praise of Putin has left him isolated, now that many Republicans are condemning the invasion, even as Republicans avoid faulting Trump directly for this.

What’s also notable, however, is how Republicans are finding new sweet spots that allow them to condemn Putin while also vaguely retaining fidelity to the underlying worldview that Trump’s praise of Putin reflects.

On Feb. 22, White House press secretary Jen Psaki dismissed former president Donald Trump’s comments after he called Russia’s move on Ukraine “smart.” (The Washington Post)

Trump has publicly praised Putin’s moves as “smart” and “savvy” and as “genius,” and he has reportedly also lavished private praise on Putin. Before this, of course, Trump accepted Putin’s denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and wielded U.S. military aid as corrupt leverage against Ukraine even as it pleaded for help against Russian aggression.

Now that this aggression has become a horrifying reality, very few Republicans have condemned Trump for any of this. But even more notable is that, while they are condemning Putin, they’re also finding ways to cast this as somehow the Trumpist position.

Criticizing Putin while blaming Biden

One way Republicans are accomplishing this is to condemn Putin’s invasion while blaming Biden for it. Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.), a member of the House GOP leadership, issued a statement ripping Putin as an “authoritarian dictator” but spent far more time attacking Biden’s “weakness.”

This is absurd. We can legitimately debate how sanctions should have been imposed, but given all we’ve seen, no one can seriously pretend earlier sanctions would have likely dissuaded the invasion. And as Damon Linker notes, Putin didn’t invade Ukraine before almost surely because Trump was also committed to Putin’s goal of weakening NATO.

But here’s the key point: Blaming Biden’s weakness also obscures Trump’s alignment with Putin on the bigger question of whether Ukrainian sovereignty and the international order should be defended in the face of Putin’s threats to it. Republicans are erasing what Trump got spectacularly wrong and replacing it with an account in which Trump was and remains eternally strong, which is faithful to Trumpism at its most base level.

Criticizing Putin with Trumpist tropes

Meanwhile, other Republicans are condemning Putin while obscuring the situation with a fog of Trumpist tropes.

Take J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author and GOP Senate candidate in Ohio. After claiming not to care about Ukraine’s fate, he abruptly issued a new statement admitting the invasion is a tragedy but blaming “elites” and “globalists” for the problem, insisting those taking action to defend Ukraine secretly want to drag the United States into armed conflict.

Here again, there’s a legitimate historical debate over whether NATO expanded too far in a way that aggrieved Russia. But Vance deep-sixes nuance: NATO’s successes in maintaining decades of relative peace and security for hundreds of millions of people are entirely erased.

Vance now dismisses the worth of sanctions against Putin. And he bizarrely claims the only “solution” to “tyranny abroad” is a strongly nationalist America — but how this would have stopped Putin is unexplained.

You see, internationalist commitments cannot simply be admittedly insufficient in a situation where armed aggression by a nuke-possessing madman leaves no good options. These commitments must have no value whatsoever and can reflect only corrupt elite plotting, and the only answer can be maximal withdraw from them. What that withdrawal is supposed to be an answer to remains unstated.

But Vance manages to condemn Putin while remaining faithful to Trumpist nationalist tropes, without admitting how aligned they — and Trump himself — are with Putin’s own worldview and goals.

Meanwhile, one of Vance’s primary opponents, former Ohio state GOP chair Jane Timken, condemns Putin’s aggression. But she also insists the true version of “America First” entails taking aggressive non-military steps against Putin, because this will “protect American security interests at home and abroad.”

It is in our interests, and in the interests of the West and liberal democracy, to defend Ukraine through sanctions and other measures. But in the real world, this has nothing in common with Trump’s vision of “America First,” which has long been all about weakening the Atlantic alliance. Magically, the alignment of “America First” Trumpism with Putin’s interests is simply erased.

Here’s the bottom line. Many Republicans are legitimately horrified by Putin’s invasion and do support action against it. What they cannot do is hold this position while also admitting that Trump consistently sided with Putin against Ukraine; that Trump’s efforts to weaken our international commitments are largely aligned with Putin and against the interests of the West; and that we’re now witnessing the awful truth about the threat that Trump consistently downplayed.

Putin is breaking 70 years of norms by invading Ukraine. What comes next?

Putin is breaking 70 years of norms by invading Ukraine. What comes next?

Tanisha M. Fazal — Read time: 5 minutes

Up until now, Russia tried to look like it was playing by the rules.

Members of a Ukrainian territorial defense battalion set up a machine gun on Feb. 25, in Kyiv. (Anastasia Vlasova/Getty Images)

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is shocking because it is so unusual for one country to so brazenly attack another’s political independence and territorial sovereignty today. A norm against territorial conquest — especially, against the wholesale erasure of countries from the world map — has conditioned international relations since the end of World War II.

Russia’s behavior raises the question: Are we witnessing the demise of that norm?

Not necessarily — but maybe.

Countries used to conquer other countries frequently

Conquest of land, including of entire countries, used to be relatively common. As I show in my book, “State Death,” buffer countries — traditionally, countries that lie between two countries that are rivals — were especially vulnerable to conquest. Often, great powers on either side of buffer states did not trust each other not to take over the buffers between them.

Poland, carved up multiple times by more-powerful neighbors, provides a clear illustration of this dynamic. But buffer states around the globe — from Korea (in 1905) to Estonia (in 1940) — died by conquest. Ukraine lies in a similarly vulnerable position, sandwiched between NATO member countries and Russia.

Beginning in the early 20th century and, certainly, after World War II, however, a norm against such territorial conquest emerged. Promoted especially by the United States, but with support around the world, this principle is most clearly enshrined in Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter: “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.”

After 1945, the violent death rate of states declined so dramatically that it virtually ceased. The norm against conquering another country is one of many factors, including the advent of nuclear weapons and increased global trade, that contributed to “the long peace” after World War II.

Countries turned to different ways to control other governments

One consequence of the emergence of the norm against conquest was a shift in the way countries exercised political control over other countries.

The norm did not magically reverse the incentives of countries that might have taken over buffer states in previous eras. But it did change how they tried to control buffer territory. Such countries sought to achieve the same political aims via different means. Thus, we saw a rise in foreign-imposed regime and leader changes of buffer countries after 1945, such as when the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956.

What does this broader history tell us about Ukraine today? If Putin’s aim is limited to overthrowing and replacing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with a pro-Russian leader, the consequences for the survivability of the norm against conquest also would be limited. As scholars such as Kimberly Howe, Roxani Krystalli and co-authors have shown in the context of Syria, however, the consequences for Ukrainians would be severe. What is more, the costs to Russia are likely to be extremely high; invaders rarely accurately assess the costs of occupation.

Until now, Russia tried to appear to be playing by the rules

International relations scholars know more about the rise than the decline of norms. But chipping away at the norm by swallowing up pieces of Ukrainian territory one chunk at a time may prove an especially effective strategy to undermine the norm.

Even as the Kremlin flouts norms and breaks international law, until now even Russia seems to have acknowledged the need to at least look as if it respected international law. In 2014, Russia tried to obscure its role in the annexation of Crimea by using “little green men” rather than sending in clearly marked Russian troops, as it has done in 2022. Similarly, there was the pretext of the Crimean “declaration of independence” and subsequent deployment of a self-determination justification for Crimea’s becoming part of Russia. Likewise, by recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk, Russia is setting itself up to use a (sham) vote to justify irredentism — claiming these territories based on historical and ethnic ties.

In other words, Russia could have taken Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk without giving any justification. While the justifications are flimsy and unconvincing, there’s a reason Russia took pains to provide them, as Villanova political science professor Jennifer Dixon shows. Putin is trying to manipulate existing norms for his own ends. His search for a pretext for invasion in the last week — and the efforts of the United States, its allies and Ukraine itself to deny him one — only reinforce this point.

This time may be different

In the end, however, Putin launched the current war by rewriting history and accusing Ukraine of aggression it didn’t commit. As bombs fall on Ukrainian cities, is his end goal the Russian annexation of all of Ukraine? Putin’s Feb. 21 speech suggests regret and nostalgia for the territorial boundaries of the Soviet empire. The response to a Russian effort to change the map of Europe in this way leads to at least two possible outcomes for the norm against conquest.

A strong global response to such an annexation attempt would be a signal of the norm’s strength. The strength of norms that proscribe behavior is most visibly gauged when those norms come under a direct challenge. For example, when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 (using a similar justification to the one that Putin seems to be proposing), the large military coalition that responded reinforced the norm against conquest.

If, however, the world accepts a wholesale annexation of Ukraine, with little effective response — if Ukraine were to be erased from Europe’s map — the norm against conquest would be severely, perhaps even fatally, damaged.

Historically, most wars between countries have been fought over territory. The norm against territorial conquest was meant to decrease the incidence of this type of war. The risk of overturning the norm is a return to a world of conquest and violent state death.

Tanisha M. Fazal is a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota and a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Find her on Twitter at @tanishafazal.

In words and deeds, Putin shows he’s rejecting even Soviet-era borders

In words and deeds, Putin shows he’s rejecting even Soviet-era borders

Daniel Treisman — Read time: 5 minutes

His speech this week makes it clear he’s out to restore “historic Russia”

President Vladimir Putin’s emotional speech on Monday justifying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was eye-opening in many ways. Among other things, it cast new light on the Russian president’s complicated and evolving relationship with the Soviet past.

Even before this week’s attack, Putin’s use of troops abroad — in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine — has been taken by some as evidence of a desire to rebuild the Soviet Union. U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), among others, have suggested this interpretation. So did President Biden in his Thursday comments announcing further sanctions.

And Putin’s own words have at times supported this interpretation — in 2005, for instance, he called the collapse of the USSR “a major geopolitical disaster of the [20th] century.”

In fact, what Monday’s speech reveals isn’t nostalgia for the Soviet state but Putin’s fury at the incompetence of early communist leaders who built it on such rickety foundations. In his current view, Vladimir Lenin and associates tore apart what Putin thinks of as “historic Russia” — and he is not about to forgive or forget.

Putin blames Russia’s Bolsheviks

In his hour-long tirade, Putin seemed at times more angry at the Bolsheviks who created the Soviet Union than at modern-day Western leaders.

Lenin, in his telling, pandered to nationalists, split up historically Russian territories and planted a land mine in the Soviet constitution by giving each Soviet republic the right to secede. Lenin, he continued, built “odious and utopian fantasies” that were “absolutely destructive” into the architecture of the state.

The Bolsheviks’ approach was “not just a mistake but much worse than a mistake.” According to Putin, their “injustices, lies and outright pillage” led directly to the 1991 Soviet collapse that scattered enclaves of ethnic Russians across now-independent countries.

Offering to help “decommunize” Ukraine, Putin made clear that the restructuring he had in mind would leave little of the country intact.

Of course, Putin’s logic here is flawed. Ukraine’s secession had nothing to do with Lenin’s secession clause. The Ukrainian independence declaration in 1991 made no mention of the Soviet constitution, which by that point had been discredited. Instead, Ukraine cited the right to self-determination in the U.N. Charter.

But that’s not the point. The real surprise in Monday’s speech is the abuse Putin heaps on communist icons and the Soviet historical record. Even the extended essay he published last summer, which in many ways prefigured this week’s speech, did not achieve the same intensity of anti-Bolshevik vitriol.

What made Putin so anti-communist?

Putin has been falling out of love with Soviet communism for a long time. The story of this disenchantment is important for what it says about the Russian president’s current motives.

As a spy in Dresden in the 1980s, Putin already saw himself as a technocratic specialist for whom too much ideology got in the way. “For us professionals,” he once told his political adviser Gleb Pavlovsky, “it hindered our work.”

As the Berlin Wall collapsed, Putin was shocked by the Soviet superpower’s inability to defend itself. Angry crowds surrounded the KGB outpost in Dresden and Putin requested reinforcements. But, as he later recalled, “Moscow was silent.” To Putin, this was a stunning betrayal of the Soviet state by its communist leaders.

Still, he remained at least ambivalent. As president, 10 years later, he was solicitous of the many communists who were nostalgic for Soviet greatness. To the horror of liberals then supporting him, he restored the rousing Soviet-era music of the national anthem. New in power, he even drank a toast to Stalin with Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov.

In part, this was electoral calculation — Putin still needed the backing of left-leaning older Russians. But in 2003, the Kremlin’s political operatives crushed the Communist Party as a political force and stole many of its voters by denouncing the party’s financial ties to billionaire oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Putin prosecuted him for tax fraud, and the Kremlin co-opted the party.

Still, Putin rarely spoke negatively about communism. In 2016, he confessed, “I really liked and still like communist and socialist ideas,” and claimed to have kept his old party card.

That Putin has complicated feelings about Russia’s past is hardly accidental. His father, a war veteran, was a loyal communist. His mother, a devout Russian Orthodox believer, secretly had the future president baptized. He grew up between two ideals.

At heart, Putin has always been a conservative, with a horror of revolutions — who was unlucky enough to grow up in a society that was forged by one. But by the Brezhnev era, when Putin came of age, the Bolshevik Revolution had crystallized into a tradition. Rather than images of anarchic street fighting, the 1917 revolution evoked ritualistic parades and collective celebrations. Paradoxically, Putin seems to have accepted the communist coloration of the Soviet past — out of conservatism.

At least, so it seemed. But a competing idea has been building for some time. Already at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, which Putin attended as a guest of NATO, he called Ukraine a “very complicated state” that had been patched together, in part, from territories taken from Russia. At that point, he seemed to recognize Ukraine’s borders as a fait accompli.

But in subsequent years, this grievance came back in ever more elaborate forms. And now a new identity has burst through. Putin no longer accepts the compromises of the Soviet past. His recent words and actions suggest he has become a radical nationalist, out to reshape borders and forge a single people out of Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians, despite the human costs of war.

Pre-1917 “historic Russia” included a range of territories beyond just Ukraine, some of which — like Kazakhstan, the Baltic states and Moldova — have ethnic Russian minorities. If Putin stays true to the convictions he embraced in his speech on Monday, the door he has opened may prove hard for the world to close.

vacation mailbag

Vacation mailbag

By Matthew Yglesias

I’ve been enjoying vacation, but you can’t keep me away from the laptop so here’s some mailbag for you all.

Back with regularly scheduled commentary on Monday!

Ollie Sayeed: Who was the best person of the 20th century in raw utilitarian terms? Deng Xiaoping, Norman Borlaug...?

There’s an interesting big picture question lurking behind this about the causal role of scientific innovators in the world. We have famous cases of very clear-cut joint or overlapping discovery. While calculus is obviously very important, it’s also pretty unambiguous that if you went back in time and assassinated Isaac Newton, Leibniz was waiting right behind him to basically do the same work.

And in a world with no Albert Einstein, someone else probably would have come up with general relativity. At the end of the day, the beauty of a scientific insight like that is it really does solve the problem, so if enough people think about the problem for long enough, someone is going to come up with it.

Politics feels much more contingency ridden to me than science. Vladimir Putin could absolutely have handled the Ukraine situation differently and Barack Obama could have intervened more forcefully in Syria or less forcefully in Libya. Borlaug’s work is a lot more applied than Newton’s or Einstein’s so I’m inclined to see it as in more of a middle ground of contingency. That said, I feel like the rhetorical function of invoking Borlaug is generally to try to raise the status of science relative to politics, making the point that developing higher-yielding varieties of wheat has saved innumerable more lives than any activist anywhere can claim credit for.

But we should also consider the possibility that Mexican President Ávila Camacho’s decision to establish the program where Borlaug did his pioneering work on wheat was kind of non-obvious. Only a small minority of the benefits of this flowed to Mexico and very few at all flowed to Camacho personally. I am not that well-versed in Mexican history, but all-in-all he seems like a pretty solid leader.

I guess what I’m saying is Deng Xiaoping is probably the right answer here.

Normie Osborn: What is the best getting to know you question to ask on dates?

Which Substacks do you subscribe to?

Andrew B: Which would do more to improve health outcomes in the US – a single payer healthcare system or a dramatic expansion in the supply of medical service providers (through some combination of increased immigration, med school admissions, and paraprofessional licensing)?

I hate to duck a question, but I genuinely think this is a kind of a false binary.

If you listen to Bernie Sanders talk about why he wants a Medicare-for-All system, he very clearly articulates the view that there is under-consumption of health care services in the United States. He says he’s fighting not just for the uninsured but also for the under-insured who presumably are not getting into the doctor enough because of copays or deductibles or what have you. And then he juxtaposes this with the money made by insurance company CEOs:

Twitter avatar for @SenSanders

But this is a fallacy that comes from thinking like an accountant. The United States does not have a large stock of unemployed doctors who could be treating the underinsured if we redistributed fiscal resources away from insurance company CEOs. And the insurance company executives are not themselves medical professionals who could be treating patients. If we want to accomplish the goals of the single-payer movement, we clearly need to expand the supply of healthcare providers. The question then is how much of the good of Medicare For All could be achieved purely through the supply-side reforms that would be necessary to make it work.

George Porter: What is your favorite Star Trek series? Original? Next gen? Voyager? DS9? Enterprise? ...

There are stretches of DS9 that probably represent the peak of Trek, but taken as a whole, TNG is the best series and I don’t really think that’s debatable if you’re a Trek fan.

Rustbeltjacobin: Matt you mention that american media coverage is weirdly dismissive of our hemispheric neighbors, in favor of heavily covering europe, the middle east & asia. So. Got any takes on mexican policy or politics for us?

Just for context, I said that as a monolingual American reader of the news, I feel much better informed about the political developments in European countries compared to those in Latin America — even a country like Mexico that is both larger than Germany and also literally adjacent to the United States.

This is odd on many levels, not least of which is the fact that many Latin American events directly impinge on American politics through migration.

But by the same token, I really don’t have many takes on Mexican politics or policy for you; I’m just really staggeringly ignorant. I just think this should be a bigger deal — promoting an atmosphere of public safety and industrialization in Mexico and Central America would be a big win for the United States and deserves to be a high-profile issue that it’s considered prestigious to work on.

Nate: What movies are you most looking forward to coming out in 2022?

My former number one most anticipated movie was “The Worst Person In The World,” which I’d heard great things about from people who saw it in 2021. And it really is good. It’s only February 23, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if no better movie comes out this year.

Beyond that, I always enjoy a “Mission Impossible” movie so I’m looking forward to the new one. I’m not sure I have a great picture in my head of what a movie version of “Killers of the Flower Moon” would look like, but I believe in betting on talent and Martin Scorcese plus Leonardo DiCaprio doing an Eric Roth adaptation of a David Grann book is a lot of talent. The preview for “The Northman” has been incredibly hyped up. “Thor: Ragnarok” is the best of the MCU movies, so I’m eager to see “Thor: Love and Thunder. “

Last but not least, all of Rian Johnson’s movies are at least interesting, so I’m curious to see what happens in “Knives Out 2.”

Sukrit: Does Matt have any thoughts on (Ben + Justin) Smith's new global news venture? The premise is there are 200 million college-educated English-language readers globally not being served by the current news offering. Bullish/bearish on the idea of a single global news source?

Ben and Justin are both very smart, so I’m sure that whatever they do will be good. In terms of its actual business prospects, it’s very hard to say. The only media business idea I’ve ever heard about where I thought “that sounds like a good idea, they’re going to make a lot of money” was Punchbowl, and they are in fact making a lot of money. But that just goes to show I am biased toward pessimism — I underrated Slow Boring’s potential for example.

I will say that as a hot takes guy, I have grown to be more and more appreciative of the virtues of old-fashioned, bland “just the facts” reporting at a time when a lot of high-profile media outlets have started putting more and more spin on the ball with their headlines, topic choice, and framing. The basic issue is that both reporting and analysis/punditry are tasks with a reasonably high degree of difficulty, and trying to do them both simultaneously at a mass scale is, I think, creating problems. There may be an opportunity for a global back to basics brand.

Jonathan Cox: In view of your post on “human history in the long run,” what books or other reading can you recommend on that subject, including human evolution and the development of civilization? I’ve read Scott’s Against the Grain and would love more reading in that same spirit.

“Sapiens” is the book that is really “about” the pairing of evolution and macro-history and a lot of people love it. I thought it was just okay, but I think people who are interested in this should check it out.

Beyond that, I’m sure there are aspects of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and William H. McNeil’s “Plagues and Peoples” that don’t hold up, but they’re both classics of big picture history for a reason. Francis Fukuyama’s “The Origins of Political Order” is a newer entrant into this genre that’s excellent.

Phillip R: Why do you delete your tweets regularly? You normally have a lot of good commentary and links to interesting articles on the site, but every couple weeks you delete them all which makes it hard to reference them later on. Have you ever explained why you choose to delete them so often (which is something that most public figures don’t do)?

I work hard on my columns, my books, and other published writing and am happy to be held accountable for them across the fullness of time. Obviously I don’t always get things right, and I’m happy to take my lumps when I get things wrong.

But while Twitter as a platform has a lot of virtues, I think those virtues are inherently tied to spontaneity. I want to be able to shoot the breeze with people in a casual, conversational manner without having it held over my head for decades if something I say off the cuff isn’t quite right. Obviously there is no way to stop people from archiving screenshots of old Yglesias tweets (and in fact people do this) but routinely mass-deleting signals in a good-faith way that I object to that kind of use of people’s Twitter track record. And while it’s true that most public figures don’t mass delete their tweets, I wish they would. I suspect they don’t in part because Twitter doesn’t make it easy to do it. If they had a checkbox where you could automatically delete tweets after 30 days, I think a lot of people would use it.

Lenzy T Jones: Observing the arguments of someone like Adolph Reed, what kind of arguments would you make to further support his arguments and dispel the idea of his thesis being “class reductionists” and push back against the “race is the basis” of everything argument at the core of woke-culture?

I like and respect Reed’s work, and I think his own piece on “The Myth of Class Reductionism” is a better refutation of that particular idea than anything that I can write.

That being said, Reed was also very critical of Barack Obama’s politics in a way that I’m not because Reed is a socialist, which I’m not. I oftentimes feel like Hillary Clinton’s 2016 primary season gambit of trying to outflank Bernie on the left with identity politics appeals opened up a wormhole we’ve been stuck in ever since. It sometimes seems as if the only alternative people can think of to Democrats talking like a university DEI coordinator (Hillary) is Democrats talking like an aging Marxist (Bernie) or achieving the higher synthesis of talking like a really smart humanities grad student (AOC). But the real trick is to just be 25 percent more normal across the board.

Doug Orleans: Can you respond to Nathan Robinson's interview with anti-YIMBY Dean Preston on the Current Affairs podcast?

One of the joys of podcasting as a medium is that hate-listening to podcasts is extremely tedious so nobody does it. Then as a podcaster, you can just talk in a relaxed way without being defensive all the time. The flip side of that is there is no way in hell that I am going to spend my time listening to a Nathan Robinson interview with Dean Preston.

James: Should we have more formal debates in various areas of society? Sure, we have presidential debates and various political debates, but those are middling at best. Housing? Debate! Public health? Debate! Schools? Debate! I’d love to see some people who aren’t politicians break down issues and address disagreements head-on. Or are debates not worthwhile?

I am very debate-skeptical and almost never agree to participate in a debate. To me, a big problem in intellectual life is people getting too invested in trying to win arguments rather than inform the audience. What’s more useful is dialogue and negotiation where people try to forge consensus on an idea that can advance everyone’s goals even without achieving perfect agreement.

David Mosley: You’ve written on how you think the future of remote work etc may be detrimental to Seattle, are there any other US cities about which you have a strong take about their future prospects?

My basic take is that we should look at tourism. For example, New York City is going to face substantial dislocations as the value of midtown office space plummets and as many people leave town in favor of cheaper housing elsewhere. But New York is also a place that attracts lots of inbound tourists. Plenty of rich celebrities who could live anywhere live in New York. Weird billionaires buy pieds-à-terre there. So the newly vacant space will be occupied by someone.

Seattle, I think, is a place that was really pretty small until recently and that not a lot of people visit as tourists. It’s not without its charms and natural beauty, to be clear, but it shares those charms with a lot of other northwestern places that are much cheaper than Seattle. There’s going to be leveling-down there.

By contrast, places like Miami or Portland, Maine or Charleston, South Carolina are spots where lots of people go and enjoy spending time and then lament that there aren’t necessarily great career opportunities there. But if you can make it in the big time while working remotely, lots of people will choose to locate in spots like that. I think the main reason this matters is that I think the cities that won’t benefit are the ones that most need help: the cold industrial cities of the Midwest and interior northeast. I think people are always searching for reasons to be optimistic about St. Louis and Cleveland and Buffalo and I just don’t see it. Cities like Nashville and Austin and Denver that already had momentum will pick up speed and be joined by a wider set of leisure destinations.

Craig W: I'm curious about economies of scale with respect to local government. It seems like it should be more efficient to deliver services to a larger number of residents. And It seems to be true in at least some cases. But it also seems that larger cities seem to be high tax environments relative to their suburbs or smaller cities. So what's going on here? Is it actually more efficient so people respond by demanding more services? Do large cities at the center of metros get stuck providing services that suburbs then free-ride on? Or is it more of a Mancur Olson thing where cities are good at generating and concentrating wealth and then interests arise to claim some of that wealth?

I think it’s basically the Olson-style point. Suburban jurisdictions tend to be fairly interchangeable, so if the governing class of one particular suburban town starts using tax dollars on useless stuff that people don’t value, it will lose out sharply to other nearby jurisdictions. This offers an imperfect but real check on misgovernment that’s called Tiebout Competition.

But Tiebout Competition is undermined by a place that has unique geographical assets like beautiful beaches or oil wells. And historically, central cities have had unique geographical assets in the form of valuable commercial real estate (this is why remote work is going to be a tough transition), which traditionally gave central cities more running room to be poorly governed.

Separately, though, there are economies of scale issues. It’s very inefficient for Bangor, Maine and Brewer, Maine to maintain separate fire and police departments to serve what’s really just one not-particular-large community. The extreme fragmentation of municipalities that you see in New England (and New Jersey) isn’t great. I’m in general a fan of city-county consolidations like you see in Jacksonville and Indianapolis as a way of addressing some of these trade-offs.

M Hamill: I'm curious if you have thoughts about "end user" solutions to inflation. That is, there has been talk about the recent inflation being at least in part, driven by stimulus and people spending their extra money on goods when there was a lack of services to be had. So then, let's say you have some money lying around and aren't sure what to do with it: In purely inflation management terms, whats the most helpful thing you could do? Buy stock? Put it in savings? Spend it on services like dining or a lavish vacation? Give it to charity? Spend it on maintenance for your old car so you dont need a new one?

There are a few different margins at work here. At the most basic level you want to shift consumption out of areas that we know are constrained (buying durable goods, burning gasoline) and into areas where there’s spare capacity. So go to the movies. Go on vacation. But ideally don’t go to the beach — go stay at a hotel in downtown Chicago or Dallas that’s hurting due to loss of business travelers. Then go see a movie there and eat at downtown restaurants.

A more advanced play is just to consume less and buy stock; increasing the national savings rate helps.

But what we really want are not savings, but investment (and yes I know that S=I by definition in the National Income and Product Accounts, but the ordinary language sense of these terms is different), so the truly optimal thing to do would be to lend your money to someone who wants to drill some oil wells.

Ivan: What did you think about Ezra Klein's interview with Jon Favreau's Offline Podcast and the discussion of popularism. Ezra talked about balancing the popular with the viral to get reach of your message. Want to know how you think about balancing those things?

It’s a fair point. But this is why I emphasize that posting is praxis. If you hit the little heart button on posts that are about Rick Scott’s plan to raise taxes on working-class retirees, then you are making those posts viral. If you hit the little heart button on posts that are about how we need to abolish ICE, then you are making those posts viral. We, as a collective, have the power to influence what is and isn’t viral.

Josh Morrison: What do you think of the "long-termism" trend in effective altruism that prioritizes reducing the risk of human extinction over near-term goals like improving global health in the present day?

People write much longer takes about this than I’m going to attempt here. But for now, I will say that I think most people (most politicians, most journalists, most bureaucratic institutions) would benefit from discounting less and caring about existential risk more. So I am always happy to recommend Toby Ord’s book and cheerlead for longtermism.

That being said, I don’t really think there’s all that much the typical person could or should do with the fact that Ord estimates there’s a 1/30 risk of existential catastrophe from an engineered pandemic versus a 1/1,000 risk from climate change or a 1/10,000 risk from a supervolcano. The estimates are obviously very imprecise and it’s also extremely hard to know ex-ante what is and isn’t going to be helpful in addressing these things.

Part of the appeal of public health work is that we have known interventions with high confidence that marginal investments of money will lead to marginal lives saved and improved. And then beyond that, we have a lot of other ideas that sound promising and a pretty good sense of how to do assessments of those ideas. And there’s a much wider set of people who are in a position to meaningfully contribute to these causes, if for no other reason than this is an area where small infusions of money really do help.

Dmo: Do you play video games at all? If so, which games? What is your history with this medium and do you have any thoughts on it?

We're nearly the same age, but I don't think I ever remember you talking about them.

People keep asking me about video games! I don’t have a lot to say about this. I owned an NES, an SNES, a Gameboy, and a Sega Genesis at different times when I was a kid but never got a more modern system. I used to play TIE Fighter at my friend Jeff’s house when we were in elementary school but I was never really into PC gaming.

The game genre that I have a deep affection for is turn-based strategy games. I was a big Civ II guy in my day. I also liked Koei’s games, especially L’Empereur. More recently my kid and I have been playing European War IV and European War VI. But I’m not a big gamer is what it comes down to — for recreation, I like to tweet.

How did Tucker Carlson turn into a Putin apologist?

Opinion | How did Tucker Carlson turn into a Putin apologist?

By Erik Wemple

Fox News host Tucker Carlson again offers his support for Russian President Vladimir Putin on his Tuesday night show. (Screenshot via YouTube/ and Screenshot via YouTube/Fox News/Screenshot via YouTube/Fox News)

That was then.

These days, Carlson is providing comfort to the Russian president in what the host on Tuesday night termed a “border dispute” with Ukraine. Addressing the Biden administration’s determination to oppose Russian aggression, Carlson said, “You’re going to win an important moral victory against dastardly old Vladimir Putin, who is much, much worse than Justin Trudeau, just so you know.”

“So you can feel good about that, because — because,” snarked the host. “Let’s see, come to think of it, why would you feel good about that?”

As with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the building blocks for Carlson’s Russophilia — or at least Russoindifferentia — have been lining up for several years now. So his propaganda during this crisis shouldn’t shock his devoted, polemic-accustomed audience.

In November 2019, Carlson was discussing the impeachment of President Donald Trump, which involved U.S. military aid to Ukraine meant to assist in its fight with Russia in Crimea and the country’s east. “Why do I care what is going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?” Carlson asked. “And I’m serious. Why do I care? Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am.”

Just before that show concluded, Carlson issued a retraction: “Earlier in the show, I noted that I was rooting for Russia in the contest between Russia and Ukraine. Of course, I’m joking. I’m only rooting for America.” Several days later, however, he clarified where his allegiances stood: “I don’t think that we should be at war with Russia. And I think we should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine. That is my view,” said Carlson.

Perhaps looking to subtweet Carlson’s whitewash, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow later that week rummaged through an inventory of Russian atrocities: annexing Crimea; helping North Korea evade sanctions; bombing hospitals and civilians in Syria to prop up an authoritarian regime; doping Olympic athletes, “then sabotaging the whole worldwide anti-doping infrastructure”; interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election; exporting high-end organized crime; and, of course, killing Kremlin critics.

There’s little chance those outrages escaped the notice of Carlson, who’s easily the best-read, best-informed troll on cable news. He understood the horror of Russia back in his MSNBC days and understands it these days, too.

Which is to say, Putin hasn’t changed; Carlson has. A convincing explanation for his embrace of Putin — as well as of Hungary’s strongman, Viktor Orbán — comes from the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum: “The aggrieved Americans who now find their way to Orbán or Vladimir Putin also dislike their own country, albeit for different reasons. They cannot abide its racial diversity, its modern culture, its free press.”

The core of Carlsonism is a roaring contempt for immigrants, whose alleged crimes he hypes and who he says make this country “poorer and dirtier.” Now compare that platform with Putin’s position: “This liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected,” Putin told the Financial Times.

Ideological affinity poured out of Carlson’s on-air lecture Tuesday, in which he blasted “permanent Washington" for its anti-Putinism.

“Why do I hate Putin so much?” mocked the host. “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity?”

The message: Putin is no worse than American liberals and various other malefactors.

Perhaps the simplest explanation, however, is just that Carlson is showing off his extremist bona fides for MAGA viewers. Say stuff that no one else is saying, no matter what; out-Trump Trump; watch the ratings spike.

Consider how Carlson fared when he was voicing less autocratic thoughts. The low-rated MSNBC program that featured him as a reasonable-yet-combative conservative went through “two names, four time slots and multiple formats” before network executives dumped it in 2008.

On this Thursday’s show, Carlson finally bowed to programming realpolitik. With Russian forces blasting their way through Ukraine, the host struck a new tone, calling the Russian action “awful” and saying, “Vladimir Putin started this war. So whatever the context of the decision that he made, he did it.”

But history — and everything we know about Carlson — instructs us not to be fooled. Don’t forget that he denounced the violence of the Capitol riot on the night of Jan. 6, 2021, then adjusted and adjusted until he was casting the rioters as persecuted freedom fighters.

Tucker Carlson has morphed into an unreasonable nihilist who boosts white nationalism, autocracy and whatever other lunacies are left in the Fox News cupboard. That formula has made his program the No. 1 show on cable news; it’ll mark its sixth baleful year on air this fall. Don’t expect Putin to stay the bad guy that long.