This episode discusses how Vladimir Putin’s worldview was shaped and explores his possible motives for invading Ukraine. Also examined is the global response to the invasion, which has not been uniform around the world, as well as how the invasion has brought about closer unity between the United States and Europe, which had been drifting apart for some time.
Guests featured in this episode:
Stephen Holmes, the Walter E. Mayer Professor of Law and co-director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University. Stephen has been the recipient of prestigious fellowships from, among others, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the Wissenschaftkolleg in Berlin, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the IWM in Vienna.
Between 1994 and 1996, he served as Director of the Soros Foundation program for promoting legal reform in Russia and Eastern Europe, and was also named Carnegie Scholar in 2003-2005 for his work on Russian legal reform.
He is also the co-author of The Light that Failed: A Reckoning with Ivan Krastev, a book that details the ride of authoritarian antiliberalism in Russia.
GLOSSARY
What is the Kievan Rus ?
(00:8:11 or p.2 in the transcript)
Kievan Rus (862-1242) was a medieval political federation located in modern-day Belarus, Ukraine, and part of Russia (the latter named for the Rus, a Scandinavian people). The name Kievan Rus is a modern-day (19th century) designation but has the same meaning as 'land of the Rus,' which is how the region was known in the Middle Ages.
The Rus ruled from the city of Kiev (also given as Kyiv) and so 'Kievan Rus' simply meant "the lands of the Rus of Kiev". The Rus are first mentioned in the Annals of Saint-Bertin which records their presence in a diplomatic mission from Constantinople to the court of Louis the Pious (r. 814-840) in 839. The annals claim they were Swedes, and this is possible, but their ethnicity has never been firmly established. Source:
What was the crisis and annexation of Crimea ?
(00:08:38 or p.2 in the transcript)
As pro-Russian protesters became increasingly assertive in Crimea, groups of armed men whose uniforms lacked any clear identifying marks surrounded the airports in Simferopol and Sevastopol.. Masked gunmen occupied the Crimean parliament building and raised a Russian flag, as pro-Russian lawmakers dismissed the sitting government and installed Sergey Aksyonov, the leader of the Russian Unity Party, as Crimea’s prime minister.
On March 6 the Crimean parliament voted to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation, with a public referendum on the matter scheduled for March 16, 2014. On the day of the referendum, observers noted numerous irregularities in the voting process, including the presence of armed men at polling stations, and the result was an overwhelming 97 percent in favour of joining Russia On March 18 Putin met with Aksyonov and other regional representatives and signed a treaty incorporating Crimea into the Russian Federation. Western governments protested the move. Within hours of the treaty’s signing, a Ukrainian soldier was killed when masked gunmen stormed a Ukrainian military base outside Simferopol. Russian troops moved to occupy bases throughout the peninsula, including Ukrainian naval headquarters in Sevastopol, as Ukraine initiated the evacuation of some 25,000 military personnel and their families from Crimea. On March 21 after the ratification of the annexation treaty by the Russian parliament, Putin signed a law formally integrating Crimea into Russia. Source:
Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:
• Central European University: CEU
• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD
• The Podcast Company: Novel
Follow us on social media!
• Central European University: @CEU
• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: @AHDCentre
Subscribe to the show. If you enjoyed what you listened to, you can support us by leaving a review and sharing our podcast in your networks!
SR: Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies around the world are facing. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna, and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
Today, we will discuss the rise of authoritarian anti-liberalism in Russia during the last decade of the Putin regime. My guest is Stephen Holmes, Professor of Law and Director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University. He has had a long and distinguished academic career, but in the mid-1990s, he also served as Director of the Soros Foundation Program for promoting legal reform in Russia and Eastern Europe, a region that he knows extremely well.
Stephen is the author of several books. His latest book, "The Light that Failed: A Reckoning", is co-authored with Ivan Krastev. Many of their insights have proved remarkably prophetic to understanding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I want to discuss with him the sources and the mechanisms of Putin's vindictive, belligerent politics, and see how he could contextualize these with the help of the theory of wartime imitation that is set out in their book.
This then raises questions about the failure of liberal democracy in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia's turn to an open confrontation with the West. An important facet of these developments is what Krastev and Holmes call “the mirroring effect”, whereby Putin explicitly tries to expose the hypocrisy of his liberal enemies in the West and the U.S.-centric international order.
How effective has this subversive strategy been, and how decisive will the current war in Ukraine be for the future of liberal democracy in the 20th century? Can a deglobalized Russia survive in isolation, or are we witnessing the rise of a new security order in a changed bipolar world with Russia increasingly dependent on China? These are some of the questions that Stephen and I will discuss today. Stephen, a very warm welcome to the podcast and thanks so much for joining me today.
S.H: Thanks so much for having me.
S.R: In "The Light that Failed," you state very clearly, and let me quote you, "Putin's Russia has become an angry revisionist power seemingly focused on destroying the European order." Re-reading your book recently, I was struck by your prophetic description of Putin's Russia as an aggressive regime driven by revenge and vindication.
You suggest that Putin has embraced a strategy of what you call and let me quote you again, "selective mirroring of violent parody of Western foreign policy behavior meant to expose the West's relative weakness in the face of Kremlin aggression and to erode the normative foundations of the American-led liberal world order." Could you explain what you mean by this diagnosis and also say something about this particular form of imitation, which you underline in the book, "agonistic confrontational intent on declaring a full-scale ideological war against the West?" And why do you think it has prevailed, where is it likely to lead?
S.H: So, there are, as you suggest, many forms, variation, modulations of imitation that are relevant to understanding Russia's and Putin's recent behavior. For example, he is clearly afraid that the Russian public might imitate the Belarusian public's uprising against a superannuated dictator. So that's a kind of imitation of which he is himself afraid. And part of the reaction, part of the incredibly violent, repressive atmosphere that's been created in Russia since the invasion began is due to this fear.
But to try to explain his own aggression, the most obvious parallel in his mind is that the West, he believes, NATO, the United States, in particular, helped break up the Soviet Union. And his aim of tit for tat revenge, as you put it, is to do the same to the West, that is to break up NATO. That's what he thought he was about to do and show that Russia could do to the West what the West had done to him.
Now, this doesn't really get to the emotional story. The emotional story there is something about being defeated in this humiliating way when the Soviet Union was so powerful, was a peer competitor of the United States, and being reduced overnight to a basket case needing Western aid, this is in the '90s, left a scar with him.
And to show the West that he wasn't weak, to show the West that he could thwart them, to show the United States that it couldn't protect Ukraine, I think has a kind of emotional satisfaction, which is really apart from any kind of strategic advantage. And I think that's really the key point that Ivan [Krastev] and I try to make that this savage or violent parody of the West; the West, which claims it's using its military power, for example, in Iraq to defend human rights, which he viewed as just hypocrisy with some justification.
And I think he's going back to something really very much deeper now. And I don't know, Shalini, how to explain this exactly, but let me try one line. That is, he is clearly a person who has a cynical, harsh, realistic vision of international politics. At the same time, he seems to have a messianic vision of the world.
That is, he seems to see himself as the savior of the Russian ethnos, a people who have been humiliated by the past 30 years and can be redeemed by what he's doing, which is quite difficult to reconcile with his being a cynic. So, I think this is one of the key things. And a second factor, which I would like to underline is that the desire to recreate an enlarged Russian world is very different from the way the Soviet Union and even the way Czarist Russia expanded. Both the Soviet Union and Czarist Russia were expansionist regimes.
They were focused on territorial aggrandizement, but neither of them were using their military power to bring in ethnic Russians. These were both multinational imperial projects, while Putin's project seems to be mono-national, mono-ethnic, which makes it seem romantic.
And then finally, if we think about the future here for one moment, this project of bringing Ukraine back to Mother Russia and reincorporating Ukraine into the Russian motherland is a project of almost no interest to those under 35 years old. So, this is a very strong generational divide in the country. So, if we're talking about the future, this is an old man's war for an old man's purpose, which I think could not speak.
I mean, there may be a rallying around the flag effect. There may be some sense that Russia is being attacked and so forth, but I think the project itself, this romantic project of gathering in the children of Kyivan Rus is, I think, of no interest to young people. So not only is he failing, but we also don't know how the military campaign is gonna turn out. He seems to be doing very badly, but in any case, the larger project for Russia's future in a way makes no sense.
S.R: So, Stephen, if I turn to a more sort of immediate aspect of the war, your book was written immediately following Russia's annexation of Crimea and the setting up of pro-Russian separatist enclaves in the Donbas where it has been fueling armed aggression since, yet it's almost gone unnoticed by most that Russia had de facto been fighting a low-intensity proxy war on Ukrainian soil for the past eight years.
Your book painted a picture which was far more ominous, almost like a total war on all fronts, which is what we are now witnessing, a war intent on restoring a bipolar world with deeply entrenched antagonistic positions facing off each other from behind enemy lines as it were.
So let me ask you, is there anything about the current invasion which surprised you, or was your surprise more about this particular moment that Putin chose to almost gamble everything which seems to have however galvanized support for him in Russia, but completely isolated him internationally in the West, however, not isolated him in many countries of the Global South who have acted very, very differently from the way probably the West expected them to?
S.H: Yes. Great question. So, about the timing, one factor I think is that Putin was presumably waiting…- hoping that Trump would be reelected, in which case, the United States could very well have pulled out of NATO making this invasion much easier for him. The key about the way we saw what he was doing in the Donbas is that Putin, strange enough, commits didactic aggression. He wants to teach a lesson.
I mean, maybe other powers do that too. I suppose they do. But in this case, he really wanted to show that he could do something, and no one could do anything about it. And this lesson, as you well know, resonates with anti-Americanism around the world. It's a kind of I'm going to show these would-be global hegemons that their hegemony is poisonous, or is viewed as a kind of hostile, last act of European imperialism, which we, Russians, we are going to lead a kind of global call it anti-imperial, anti-American hegemony campaign, which will include, first of all, an accusation justified of American hypocrisy. Which I think is very important for the way he positions himself as a hard-eyed realist who can see through the claim of Americans to defending democracy and human rights and really acting out of their own crude interests and their own desire to dominate. But also, various aspects of American liberalism, including gay marriage and kind of a secular humanism, you might call it, which would be devoid of traditional values.
Now that has a kind of comic quality when you hear it coming out of Putin's mouth because he's not exactly a religious person with a deep moral compass that can claim to feel threatened by Western individualism or something of this kind. But I think he positions himself that way, and it does have resonance elsewhere. But in any case, he associates these factors, secularism, the dissolution of traditional gender roles, and so on, he associates that with what is observably a weakening of American democracy at this moment.
I mean, the United States is in a crisis, is in a political crisis due to the veering into a direction of, I would say, madness of the Republican Party and that weakness as it unfolds and if it leads to a breakdown of American democracy, and I think he thinks that's possible, that would have enormous global effects.
S.R: So, if I look at another claim in your book, which was an intriguing one when I first read it, and then I thought, "Could it be that you were both mistaken?" You make the argument in the book that we should not mistake Putin's revanchist stance for new imperial expansionism because his true goal is isolationism. And you argue, let me quote you, that "insulating the country from the liberal West is more important to him than annexing adjacent lands."
Do you think he's changed his strategy here, or do you think both of these is true, it's about isolation and annexation? And what seems a very surprising twist to this is can we talk about new imperialism in the absence of any positive project on Putin's part because the war seems to be motivated, as you put it, by sheer negation?
S.H: It is a paradox that the project of annexation, which he is failing to achieve, has led to the increased isolation of Russia. So, the two things don't seem to be as consistent with each other as you might have thought, but, well, he already annexed Belarus, which I believe was a very fateful first step, and probably led him to think, "Well, I've already integrated one of the children of ancient Rus, why not the other and the main one?"
But to build a world, a purely Russian world in which he was no longer being lectured to by the West. I think this is a very big problem, which makes other countries around the world sympathize with the Russian position because the Americans do tend to go around the world and lecture people and tell them how they should organize their societies.
So, by saying, I'm going to not listen to you, we're going to be ourselves, we're not going to be your pupils anymore, you're not our masters. So that's a kind of strangely anti-imperial project, even though, of course, what Putin is doing is seen from the Ukrainian point of view, obviously, as a kind of imperialistic process. And so, in a way, the paradox of the moment is that both the aggressor and the aggressed upon see this as an anti-imperial struggle.
So strangely, you have to go back into Putin's warped mind to understand that that's the way he sees it. I mean, why would a project aimed at gathering Kyivan Rus' back into Russia lead to this kind of razing of cities and the killing of so many innocent people, which, of course, has now created an environment in the West. Now this question of West and non-West is really interesting, and how that's gonna play out, I don't know.
But in the West, there's a kind of moral revulsion at Russia now, which is not gonna go away. It's not gonna change the feeling that this is a sick country. So that's, I think, not gonna change. The question of how China develops its relation to Russia is important. I think probably Xi Jinping does not like all of the comments about a man who's been in power too long and looks senile, that's probably a bad look for Xi Jinping.
But I do think that all of this, including the potential breakdown of the United States, means that we are not talking just about a brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia, we're talking about a moment that is capturing a shaking of the foundations of the world order. This is one of those really earth-shaking events, like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. It can be little, but it's got echoes and reverberations everywhere.
S.R: So, Stephen, to come back to the point on imitation, and when you describe wartime imitation as central to Russian foreign policy, one aspect you're focused on is the strategy of exposing the hypocrisy of the West. And Putin tries to counter Western hegemony by adopting the liberal discourse on protecting human rights, or protecting endangered ethnic minorities, or in this particular case, of course, the totally trumped-up idea of denazifying Ukraine.
But already in your book four years ago, you've written, and I quote you, "The aim is to rip off the West's liberal mask and to show that the United States too, contrary to its carefully crafted image, plays in the international arena according to the rules of the jungle." Now, if you look at the Russian military interventions in Georgia, in Libya, in Syria, they all relied on legitimizing discourses which imitated those used by NATO, for example, when it bombed Serbia or the U.S. so-called wars of terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And the question that arises then is, is this kind of imitation, this mirroring of the West merely a provocative tactic deployed to defy the international liberal order, or does it really rally constituencies at home, but also, particularly critics of American imperialism around the world? And then the question is for me, how can one best defend liberal democratic interventionism with this kind of ironic mirroring of it?
S.H: So, I want to say just a couple of words first before I answer your question about how imitation is playing out on the ground because you see, for one thing, at the very beginning, the Russian soldiers were dressing up like Ukrainians, putting on Ukrainian uniforms, this kind of aggressive imitation. But there's also defensive imitation. I read this morning that in hospitals when they're taking in wounded Ukrainian soldiers, they take away their name tags and dress them like civilians. They're afraid of Russians coming in and killing them.
So, imitation in wartime has many features. And I think there's much study of this, and there's really a lot to be explored in how imitation allows you to deceive the enemy.
On the larger question which you asked though, I think the desire to tear off the mask, our thought in the book was that this obsession – and Putin seems to really be obsessed with American hypocrisy unlike, I think, the Chinese notice it, but probably aren't obsessed by it. They think, "Okay, they talk values, they act on interests. So what?" But for Putin, this is: how are these Americans managing to present themselves in such a dishonest way? And it became, in our view, so important in his motivations.
And, for example, when he justified the annexation of Crimea, he used more or less the same words as the U.S. authorities used in justifying the independence of Kosovo, and the mirroring actually strangely is a sign of his subordination to the West. And it's so powerful that it makes his actions unstrategic. Then I would say more specifically about Ukraine, the way he presents himself as an imitator is to say, we are doing to Ukraine what you did to Iraq.
That is, this is a case of a superior military power invading a weaker country and wrecking it just because it can. At the same time, what he claims to be doing in Ukraine, he, Putin, is doing in Ukraine, what Stalin did to the mighty German Wehrmacht. That is, he's fighting a war again against the Nazis. Now, this is what makes most observers feel like he's not exactly compos mentis, because normally when you have a rationale for a war, that rationale has to have some relation to reality. But the rationale he gives is that Zelensky is like Bandera, the Ukrainians are Nazis trying to exterminate the ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine, and so on. He's giving a picture of reality that has nothing to do with reality.
S.R: Let me ask you something about the role of intelligence, military intelligence in this war, Stephen, that has puzzled me. Many people say that Russian intelligence was obviously extremely unreliable because they had predicted that they could swiftly take over the country, win an easy victory, and occupy Ukraine, something which is not going to happen because of the extremely courageous resistance, which not only the Ukrainian military, but also civilians have put up.
But what surprised me equally was that the U.S. government made public its intelligence reports on the impending war in the weeks leading up to February 24th. Do you have a sense of why they aired all these plans, was it just deterrence, or do you think they had a different audience in mind, not just the domestic one, but also an audience within Russia?
S.H: Yes, definitely. I think the common interpretation of the decision to declassify these intercepts on the basis of which the Americans had concluded that Russia was going to invade, the common explanation is that somehow this ruins Russia's narrative because Putin was going to stage Ukrainian provocations and so on, which I think is a very weak explanation. More plausible, in my opinion, is the understanding of the Americans that Russian policymaking and Russia's preparation for the war, for the invasion, was very much stove-piped.
And so, the different ministries, different departments, even in the security services weren't sharing information with each other. Some were very much apprised, some were told what was going to happen, but you could see this in the security council meeting where Naryshkin, who is the head of foreign intelligence clearly didn't know what was going to happen. And Putin humiliated him in public for whatever sadistic reasons of his own. I don't know.
But in any case, it was clear that there was a lack of knowledge being shared among all the groups, and my friends in Moscow in the foreign ministry were also shocked. Many people who are very plugged in in Moscow whom I spoke with in the middle of February were assuring me that no invasion was possible and people in Moscow, they hear what's happening. So, if it was known, these are people who would've heard it. So, it was kept very close.
So, one of the things the revelations showed at first, it sounded like Americans were arrogant. They pretend to know something they don't know. They're saying things that aren't true, but once the invasion began, in retrospect, this strategy revealed to people in high places in Russia, that they were being lied to, that they were being deceived.
S.R: There's one more angle to the story, I think, which I'd like to explore with you before we conclude. And that is many of Putin's populist far-right supporters in Europe are caught on the wrong foot, from Salvini to Orbán, but also in the U.S., Tucker Carlson, or Bolsonaro in Brazil. But interestingly, many of the critics of U.S. imperialism and neoliberal capitalism on the left from say, David Harvey to Wolfgang Streeck in Germany, Mike Davis has all been rather too eager to blame the U.S. and NATO for provoking Russia and undermining its security with the constant threat of NATO's eastward expansion.
How should we read these critiques? Is this merely proving the remarkable success of the Russian propaganda machine, or do you think there is at least some grain of truth to these accusations that have fueled growing anti-Americanism in many places in the world?
S.H: So, the "NATO made me do it" explanation, not justification, but explanation of the invasion of Ukraine seems to me very childish and very unrealistic because it excludes all of the contingencies of history and the actions of individuals who make choices of certain kinds. So, this would be like saying, well, you know, Hitler did start a war that led to the deaths of 100 million people, but it was all caused by the Versailles treaty. You know, the Versailles treaty made him do it.
Well, you know, there are a lot of things to intervene. So, I find that very in a way pointless, but a way of finger-pointing, it's a way of trying to not look at the brutality of Russia, not looking at the cruelty, the viciousness. And I think the ideological reflex action to blame America because the only actor in the world, I think this is something you've said, Shalini, that the only actor in the world is America and everyone else is just reacting. I think that's a very narrow and implausible way to understand these developments or any historical developments.
S.R: So, let's conclude, Stephen, by reflecting on the possible impact the war in Ukraine might have on the traditional post-Westphalian conception of liberal democracy. I mean, the nation-state has historically been the privileged political scale for liberal democratic constitutionalism. And the question then is could the emergence of stronger regional and international alliances be one silver lining as the result of this horrific war? Do you think we are moving towards larger cooperation?
S.H: I do think before this happened, the Atlantic Ocean was getting wider and wider, and the United States was starting to focus much more on China. In its confrontation with China, the Europeans would be of minimal help even though, of course, in general, that connection has been very healthy because it is a shared culture. It's not just a shared threat. European-American societies have a deep cultural connection, so this was kind of a world in which it was possible to hear criticisms of yourself from groups that are somehow related, but not yourself.
So, I think that was happening before. Now, we've been shaken, and the U.S. and Europe have been pulled together quickly in response to what Putin has done. I don't think it's gonna end quickly because I think the security threat from instability because all the offshoots, all the consequences of this invasion are gonna keep playing out, including economic ones, including the grain shortage in the world and so forth.
These are all gonna be playing on for a long time, which are gonna require cooperation between the United States and Europe. Will it happen elsewhere? You tell me. I mean, in a way, the India-China relation has been very fraught, but both of them seem to have some kind of tendency to associate themselves with Russian anti-Americanism. So, is it possible that a brutal destructive war, the invasion of Ukraine could actually reconcile India and China? That seems to me a rather far-fetched thought, but in any case, I guess that's something people are watching.
S.R: So, thank you very, very much, Stephen, for these insights into the dynamics of the Russian invasion of Ukraine with devastating consequences that we are seeing every day, but also for your insights into the regime that is behind that destruction and especially Putin's mindset. Thank you so much for joining me today.
S.H: Thank you.
S.R: So, let me conclude by maybe picking up a few of the points that Stephen Holmes has made. The humiliating defeat of the Soviet Union is something which colored Putin's worldview. NATO and the U.S. helped break up the Soviet Union. That is the greatest tragedy of the 20th century for Putin. So, he now wants to break up the West.
This is not merely about strategy, but it's equally about an emotional satisfaction gained in humiliating the West in return. There's a curious mix of cynicism and a messianic mission that we are seeing behind this unjustified aggression, but it is also a didactic aggression undertaken to teach the West a lesson.
The failure of liberal democracy in the U.S. is likely to have earth-shaking global consequences, one of the lessons that we do need to think about as we look towards the 2022 and then 2024 elections in the U.S. We are witnessing the shaking up of the foundations of the international order, the international security order, and liberal international order.
Paradoxically, Putin's aim of annexing Ukraine has also led to the complete isolation of Russia, especially in the Western world, but both Putin and Ukraine see the war as an anti-imperialist war strange as it may seem. For in Putin's eyes, this is a war he has undertaken in order to defeat U.S. imperialism. His war has, however, thrown Europe back into the arms of America and Russia into the arms of China, an embrace which may become increasingly uncomfortable for the Russians.
Thank you very much for listening. Join us also for the next episode in two weeks' time. Please go back and listen to any of the episodes you might have missed. And, of course, let you friends know about this podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu, and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.