gracchusdixit

Mark Twain famously quipped:  “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”  Never has this wisecrack from America’s foremost wiseacre seemed wiser than now.  As the brutal battalions of Vladimir Putin pummel Ukraine, ending three generations of peace in Europe, upending the rather smug assumptions of the global political elite, and quite possibly reanimating the Cold War, pundits both here and abroad have been blathering interminably, blaming Putin for what many call his criminal behavior but also trying to make some sense of it.  The predominating narrative is that Vlad-the-Mad is no less unhinged from reality than his American doppelgänger, Donald Trump, and could quite possibly be insane.  

The truth, alas, is more mundane—but no less terrible for being so.  

In reality, there is nothing in the least degree unusual, inexplicable, or surprising about Vladimir Putin’s behavior.  On the contrary, the only surprise would have been if he had behaved in any other way, for he is merely the latest in long series of murderous Russian autocrats.  However “abnormal” his actions may seem to the rest of the world, they are little more than the latest example of the grotesque abnormality of Russian history as a whole.

The first unhinged autocrat to declare himself “Tsar of All Russia” was Ivan IV, who in the 1500‘s was the ruler of Muscovy, one of the most dismal patches of earth on the planet.  Ivan’s declaration was by definition the act of a madman, since”Russia” was little more than a fiction, and the title, “tsar,” was a preposterously grandiose attempt to mimic the Caesars of ancient Rome.

Preposterous or not, Ivan was called “The Terrible” for good reason.  Among his other atrocities, he murdered his own son in a fit of drunken and demented rage and beat his daughter-in-law so brutally that she miscarried the very child that would ultimately have been his heir.  In this, Ivan initiated a long tradition of Russian autocrats doing their very best to destroy themselves along with the people they ruled.

After Ivan, there were glimmers of hope that things might improve, but they quickly proved to be illusive.

In the late 1600‘s, Peter, called “the Great,” took the throne.  By the standards of the time, Peter was an enlightened monarch, determined to drag his reluctant nation from its medieval past into the modern age. The methods he chose, however, were anything but modern or enlightened.  

Out of the gate, Peter gained power by pushing his sister off the throne and forcing her to become a nun—the act of a “modern” man, if ever there was one!  He then played the same trick on his first wife, compelling her to exchange their conjugal bed for a convent.  Later, he humiliated his nobles, or boyars, by forcing them to shave off their beards and cast off the long robes that had for centuries signified their exalted status.  And finally, when he decided to build a new capital city, which he christened St. Petersburg to glorify himself, he did so with the forced labor of serfs, at least 100,000 of whom died in the process.  However “enlightened” Peter may otherwise have been, he didn’t hesitate to use the darkest of means to achieve his purposes.

Much the same can be said of Catherine, also called “the Great,” who became Empress of Russia in the late 1700’s.  Catherine rose to power by orchestrating a coup d’état that toppled her own husband, a decent but sadly ineffectual man who died soon thereafter, in all likelihood because Catherine had him murdered.  Like her predecessor, Peter, Catherine professed to admire the European Enlightenment and showered her largesse on many of its leading figures, including Voltaire, the foremost French philosophe.  

None of this, however, prevented Catherine from behaving as the ruthless autocrat she actually was.  She personally owned half a million serfs and treated them as little more than as disposable beasts of burden, whose sole purpose in life was to be worked to death; she branded Russia’s Jews as “foreigners,” denying them legal rights; and she brutally suppressed any challenges to her “enlightened” rule.  

Despite all that, Catherine managed to convince herself that she was adored by her subjects, a fantasy that constantly had to be propped up by her sycophantic enablers.  The most infamous of these was Grigory Potemkin, who also happened to be one of Catherine’s innumerable lovers.  During a tour of the Crimea, which Catherine has stolen from the ailing Ottoman Empire, Potemkin lined his beloved’s route with an 18th century equivalent of Disneyland:  make-belief villages, filled with faux prosperous and cheering crowds.  Thus, the  phrase, “Potemkin Village,” has become the ultimate metaphor for the tendency of autocratic regimes everywhere to deceive, not only those they oppress, but also themselves.

Not long after Catherine’s death, her grandson, Alexander I, ascended to the throne,  riding a wave of high hopes and expectations, much as Vladimir Putin did 200 years later.  Alexander talked a good game, presenting himself as an “enlightened” monarch who promised to reform and liberalize Russia’s repressive governing institutions.  

It didn’t long, however, for Alexander to revert to type.  Not only did he join the coalition that defeated Napoleon Bonaparte, he enthusiastically backed its decision to crush the liberté, égalité, fraternité promised by the French Revolution:

Even when the last of the Tsars, Nicholas II, was overthrown, Russia’s infatuation with autocracy continued unabated.  For all Lenin’s talk about “the proletariat,” he didn’t give a fig for common people, happily turning Russia into a one-man dictatorship the moment he got the chance.  His successor, “Uncle Joe” Stalin, went even further, murdering several million political opponents and starving millions more along the way.  

There is, in short, nothing new about the murderous behavior of Vladimir Putin.  Nor is there anything novel about his pathological fixation with “the west”.  Throughout their history, Russians have never been able to decide who they are or where they fit in.   Is their country part of Europe or Asia, or is it some combination of the two?  There is ample reason for this confusion, since their country straddles both ends of the vast Eurasian land mass, and the cultural, social, and religious traditions of Russia are a tangled mess that cannot readily be sorted or classified.  

Whatever the causes of Russia’s cultural confusion, it has produced no end of mischief for centuries and continues to do so now, as the latest Russian autocrat works out his mad anxieties in front of our eyes, spilling the blood of Ukrainians and his own people with equal abandon.

Russia has been governed by lethal gangsters like Vladimir Putin for more than five hundred years, and anyone with an ounce of historical perspective should have realized this long ago.  The very idea that such a nation would ever abandon its past and bow its head to the “ideals” of western democracy was always a dangerously naive conceit.  That the paid pundits who populate cable news embraced this folly is trivial.  That countless western political and diplomatic leaders did the same has proved to be a tragic mistake.  They should have paid more attention to Mark Twain.  When history rhymes, it rhymes with a vengeance.