How and why Putin can return "victorious" as head of post-war Russia (Op-ed)

The time for conclusions has not yet come, for their time – like that of lasting peace in Ukraine – is still far away, and the lasting consequences of the war cannot even be fathomed. It is, however, the right time for a series of clarifications, which are so necessary to us, especially since we Romanians have been staring at Russia for over a century without understanding much.

Although Russia was and still is a globally integrated economy, the corrupt distribution of the benefits of globalization has meant that they have not reached the majority of those living outside the country’s major cities. Located outside the Kremlin’s electoral priorities, literally and figuratively far from the false glow of the clan capitalism of the major urban centers, it is precisely these Russians who constitute the almost impregnable stronghold of Putin’s imperialism.

Cosmin Popa is a historian at the „Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History (photo source: Petru Solomon)

Many people, including myself for a while, hoped that Russian society would react disapprovingly to Putin’s war against Ukraine. Not only because it would not enjoy real support, even in the two capitals, but mainly because the war against the Ukrainian ‘brothers’ contradicts the Russian historiographical and cultural imaginary as it has been constructed over the last century.

Otherwise, both in the Soviet past and especially in the Putinist present, Russians have been „programmed” by official propaganda for an „inevitable” confrontation with the West. An economic, technological, cultural, and, above all, military confrontation. By selectively extracting from the Soviet past everything that could serve to consolidate the „new national idea”, in reality, an amalgamation of Russian political obsessions from all eras, after 2014 Putin placed his society in a state of constant chauvinistic and militaristic frenzy, which ended up engulfing the majority. Such a state, which certainly even those who initiated it have allowed themselves to be gripped by, prevents a great many from perceiving reality in any other way than as proffered by the Kremlin.

Russians do not react en masse to the tragedy in Ukraine and the disastrous situation their country has ended up in because, unfortunately, most of them live in an imaginary political world and are governed by mental mechanisms and historical archetypes that annihilate their need for objective information. Anything that does not conform to official ideological patterns intrigues them, tires them, and, above all, makes most of them suspicious.

Having an excellent self-image of themselves, as the Romanians did 10-15 years ago, the Russians cannot critically absorb their history and are convinced that their role in history is, by excellence, a positive one. Just as many of my compatriots were skeptical, even outraged, about the crimes committed by the Romanians against the Jews in the Second World War, so Russians do not want to believe that they are part of a nation waging an imperialist war in Ukraine, or that their neighbors in former Eastern Europe, whom Putin called on to calm down, see Moscow as a permanent source of political and human tragedy.

It’s no wonder that many people, including Russian officials, can’t believe that the Ukrainians don’t greet them with flowers, but with American missiles. An explanation, again originating from within this system, has also been found for this „historical anomaly”. Namely that the Ukrainians, through the „nationalists” in power, are „prisoners” of the Americans, who prevent them from manifesting themselves as „history”, in its official version, dictates. That is why Ukraine and the Ukrainians must be ‘saved’ by the Russian occupation, and why the war is being waged, in fact, not against their ‘little brothers’, but against those who are holding them ‘prisoners’ through a ‘clique of Banderaists’.

The solid vestiges of Stalinism, carefully preserved by Putin in the collective consciousness of the Russians, have violently pierced the thin wave of technologized modernity of the Kremlin’s propaganda, revealing the essence of the regime in all its horror. As at the end of the 1940s, the place of Western ‘allies’ – which in Putin’s version of Russia were mere ‘partners’ – was taken by ‘cliques’, like Tito’s in post-1948 Yugoslavia, and in the place of simple democracy without any particularities, ‘popular democracy’, like that of 1947 Romania, reappeared, at least in Donbass and Lugansk.

Putin, and especially the Russians who support him, are not waging war now against a people who do not want to live under a dictatorship, nor against a sovereign state, and neither are they fighting a modern war. They are fighting in a cynical farce, a deadly and distorted re-enactment of World War II, in which Soviet Ukraine, led by none other than Bandera, absurdly opposes liberation from the „Nazi yoke” by the Red Army, now renamed the Russian Army.

Putin seems to have decided to burn bridges with the immensely Russian bureaucracy, which is as much opulent as it is incompetent. Like Peter the Great, who discovered to his astonishment that Prince Menshikov had pocketed the money entrusted to him to build the new capital, Putin is now convinced that the incompetence and corruption of those through whom he has ruled, have robbed him of the fruits of a seemingly certain victory.

If it is true that Putin has decided to seize from the bureaucrats’ accounts everything that exceeds their three-year income, then it is clear that he will count on the support of a population he wants to fanaticize and on the new structures of his regime, which he has built in secret, away from the eyes of those close to him. He will thus once again put himself at the head of the hysterical impoverished populace, which he himself and not Western sanctions has created, thus preparing not only an honorable exit from the war with Ukraine but above all a triumphant return to the head of the Russians. The hatred towards the West of those who support him will be equal to that towards the Emperor’s „wicked and cunning advisers” who prevent him from being kind to his people.

His conflict with the imperial bureaucracy signifies the beginning of purges, which even if they will not reach the scale and violence of the Stalinist ones, will lead to the formation of a new bureaucracy, motivated not so much by fabulous gains as by faith in the „providential” leader of a Russia that is in „mortal danger”. The relatively discreet elimination of those who were in charge of the propaganda and organizational preparation for the invasion of Ukraine is only the beginning of Putin’s bloody new political strategy, at the end of which he has every chance of regaining the aura of an infallible leader. Who’s to stop him? Although, it’s worth remembering that Peter eventually recalled Menshikov at his side, considering theft less dangerous than treason.

On the false dilemma of Russian culture versus politics and the prospects of (un)popular democracy in this country, on another occasion.

Cosmin Popa is a historian at the „Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History

Article translated from Romanian by Ovidiu H.