Joseph
Stalin
Ground
truth?
May 10th,
2022. What is Putin’s Weltanschaaung? What is his ground truth? To understand
that one needs to reach back into Russia’s tragic past and understand the
Russian elite’s obsession with the West, primarily Germany, and their tawdry
belief that the lands in-between are little more than pawns in their
never-ending addiction to incompetent Realpolitik.
Victory Day,
or Den Pobedy as the Russians would have it, did not see Putin declare all-out
war on Ukraine, although his speech was a catalogue of lies about NATO, Nazis,
nukes and the existential threat from no-one Russia apparently faces. Putin
needs an existential threat to Russia precisely because he offers precious
little else to the Russian people. Victory Day is not just about the Great
Patriotic War. It is also a metaphor for the creation of the Soviet empire that
subjugated much of Central and Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989 in the
guise of ‘liberating’ Europeans from Nazism.
That latter reflection is perhaps the most important takeaway from this
year’s underwhelming parade given the tragedy Putin is inflicting on Ukraine. The fact that General Valery Gerasimov was
unable to attend because he is in hospital recovering from his wounds is almost
another metaphor for Putin’s hopeless and desperate gamble.
Victory Day
had been meant to commemorate Putin’s strategic victory in the Ukraine War and
the imposition of his nationalistic Soviet-style, anti-Nazi ideology on the
Ukrainian people. Instead, it was an essentially defensive exercise in political
expectation management. This is because
Putin’s ground truth is driven by his own survival in a country that has no
mechanism for peaceful political change or the ability to adapt. Take Britain.
A century ago the British ruled the largest empire the world had ever seen but
soon lost it. Britain adapted and became
a modern European liberal democracy. The problem for Putin and Russia is an
inability to adapt to a changing world.
War and
peace
What are the
lessons from history? Firstly, it is not Muscovite liberals who worry Putin, much
though the West wishes it. It is the ultra-nationalists to Putin’s
(hard-to-believe) political right who really do believe in Stalin’s maxim that
all that matters is how far the Russian Army can reach. Thankfully for much of Europe, and only for
the moment, it is not very far, but it will not always be so. A study of
Russian military history suggests that whilst the Kremlin finds it hard to
adapt, given time the Russian General Staff does not.
Implicit in
Putin’s Victory Day speech was an inferiority complex with the ‘West’ from
which Russian leaders have suffered at least as far as Peter the Great and the
seventeenth century. This is evident in Putin’s repeated references to past
Russian heroes, such as Alexander Nevsky and the struggle against the Teutonic
Knights, and even if Prince Grigori Potemkin would have been more appropriate.
However, it is
Russia’s tortured twentieth century history which is most relevant to Putin’s Weltanschaaung,
particularly Moscow’s complicated, duplicitous, Realpolitik relations with
Germany. Indeed, Putin’s Realpolitik can be traced back to one event: the 1919
Treaty of Versailles. Lenin’s Bolshevik regime felt as much aggrieved by the
Treaty of Versailles as Weimar Germany.
Both Moscow and Berlin believed the terms imposed on them by the
victorious World War One allies, several of whom supported the anti-Bolshevik
Russian White Army in the 1919 civil war, were unduly harsh. The tipping point was the failed 1922 Treaty
of Genoa. British Prime Minister Lloyd
George was all-too aware that Versailles far from ending the war to end all
wars would simply delay another blood reckoning in Europe and endeavoured to
bring all the European powers together at the Conference of Genoa to give the
League of Nations some teeth. However,
with the absence of the United States and France’s reluctance Lloyd George’s
demarche was always going to be a long shot.
Even as Lloyd
George was prematurely celebrating the success of his new European security
order at Genoa Russia and Germany were meeting secretly at Rapallo where they established
‘friendly relations’ based on Germany’s need for raw materials and Russia’s
supply of it. Nothing new there then. Rapallo also had secret clauses, which
were meant to have been outlawed by Versailles that led to the Germans being
offered facilities in Russia to test both tanks and aircraft illegal under
Versailles. The tank testing centre was
led by one Heinz Guderian wo twenty years later would come back with his panzer
armies to devastate the Soviet Union.
In spite of
the 1925 Treaty of Locarno at which Britain and France sought to normalise
relations with Weimar Germany and in return for the confirmations of post-Versailles
borders the Russo-German accord doomed Europe to catastrophe. Taken together
with the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the failed World Disarmament Conference
between 1932 and 1934, US isolationism and British and French impoverishment Genoa,
Rapallo and Locarno set a fragile pattern for European security relations in
the interbellum and beyond. In the
self-willed absence of the United States from Europe Britain and France simply
lacked the power and the will to engage in European Realpolitik, not least
because of their focus on vulnerable global empires. In the vacuum Germany, the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s
equally aggrieved fascist Italy set about revising the European order in their
favour. For much of the interbellum the British and French political establishments
saw Bolshevism and the Soviet Union as the major threat to the established
European order.
And then came
Hitler. It became increasingly obvious in the wake of the remilitarisation of
the Rhineland in 1936 and the Anschluss in 1938 that the fragile European order
would soon collapse. Fearing a repeat of 1914-1918 only British prime ministers
Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain continued to harbour naïve hopes that
Hitler could be convinced of the merits of disarmament. France, meanwhile, had politically
imploded during the Popular Front governments. As it became ever clearer that
Nazi Germany intended to destroy Versailles by force if needs be a race
developed between Britain and France and Stalin’s Soviet Union to ensure that
Hitler would attack the other first.
The lands
in between
The victims of
this European Great Game were the lands in between and its icon was Munich. First, in September 1938 Czechoslovakia was
dismembered by the ‘peace in our time’ Munich agreement by which Chamberlain
believed he had bought off Hitler with the Sudetenland. Second, when it became
clear that Hitler also wanted ‘lebensraum’ in Poland and Ukraine Stalin began
to see the threat. Third, firm in their belief that Bolshevism and Nazism were
such mortal enemies London and Paris naively believed they might form some form
of pact with the Soviet Union to contain Hitler. They thought Stalin would be
amenable to such a pact because he had just decimated the senior command of the
Red Army through purges. In 1939 the
Russians were also humiliated by the Finns on the Mannerheim Line in circumstances
of incompetence eerily similar to today’s Ukraine War.
However, Hitler
and Stalin were also the ultimate practitioners of Realpolitik in spite of
their fundamental ideological struggle.
In August 1939, much to the shock of Britain and France, they signed the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (named after their respective foreign ministers of the
time) even as a British military mission was in Moscow. The Pact not only
ensured that Hitler would first seek to drive Britain and France out of the
war, it also sealed the brutal fate of the lands in between Germany and Russia.
At Brest in September 1939 Poland was divided up between Germany and the Soviet
Union, under the terms of yet another secret protocol, whilst in June 1940
Stalin invaded the Baltic States.
Perhaps the most telling echo of the past, albeit
the reverse of Germany’s thinking in 2022, was Stalin’s belief that Hitler’s
economic dependence on the Soviet Union was the best security guarantee. After
all, in early 1941 the Soviet Union supplied 74% of Germany’s phosphate, 67% of
its asbestos, and 65% of its chrome, 55% of its manganese, 40% of its nickel
and 35% of its oil, all of which were vital for the conduct of Hitler’s war in
the West. In January 1941, Germany and
the Soviet Union even signed a new trade agreement that made Berlin reliant
upon Moscow for 70% of its trade. And yet, in June 1941 Hitler launched
Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union.
For three days Stalin was paralyzed by shock.
What of today? Those in the West calling for a cease-fire should be careful not to again confuse diplomacy with appeasement and simply confirm Russia in its ill-gotten gains. Those same people must also be careful not to see Ukraine as a large country faraway about which we know little, a la Chamberlain. The 2022 Ukraine War, for that is what it is, is resetting the strategic and geopolitical context of NATO, Europe and the wider world. As I told NATO ambassadors Putin is forcing the world of globalised just-in-time back to the hard Realpolitik of just-in-case. He is reminding European leaders who have for too long abandoned sound defence of the dangers of being seduced by economists who do not understand that power and coercion can exist independently of supply and demand.
Given that the West now faces a choice. Force Ukraine to accept Putin’s ground truth on Ukraine’s ground and thus enable Moscow to impose its system as far as Putin’s army can reach, or commit to a clear set of strategic aims that culminate with the return eventually to the restoration of Ukraine’s borders. If Ukraine is forced to face a frozen stalemate on Russian terms those in Western Europe who imposed it on Kyiv will be the natural heirs of Chamberlain ad any such ‘accord’, far from being a success of diplomacy merely the latest ‘peace in our time’ appeasers. Why not sign it in Munich?
However, before any longer term strategy can be established it is vital Ukraine is given the means to resist the latest Russian offensive. Specifically, that means denying the Russians success in the first phase of their current operation, the seizure of an axis that links Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhina, Kostyantyniska, and Donetsk, which if successful would turn a salient into a pocket enabling Russian air power to destroy Ukrainian regular army formations, much like the destruction of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group B in the Falaise Gap in August 1944. Without securing that objective the Russians will be unable to conduct phase 2 of the offensive and the clear-out of Ukrainian forces up to the Donetsk Oblast border. Only when this offensive has succeeded/failed can 'we' (whomsoever that is going forward) properly tailor Western support over campaign time and space. What matters now is maintaining the coherence, manoeuvre and counter-attack fighting power of engaged Ukrainian forces.
The simple and tragic truth about Putin’s ground truth is that once again it is the lands in between who are paying the ultimate price for Russia’s geopolitical folly, malpractice, paranoia and sheer incompetence. Putin’s ‘ground truth’ is in fact no truth and his Weltanschaaung is the corrupt view of a corrupt history by a corrupt elite. NATO’s job is to ensure that the Russian Army can only impose the Russian system within Russia’s legitimate borders now and into the future.
