{UAH} Putin: History Tells Him That He Doesn’t Have A Choice Now

Putin knows that Russians don't have much time for autocrats who lose wars.

www.news.com.au

The difference in the face of Vladimir Putin between the way it looks now and how it looked even in 2018 is apparent to anyone who looks at it. It might be the face of someone who has had plastic surgery. It might be the face of someone getting older. It might be the face of someone who lost a fight with a bottle of Stolichnaya the night before.

But it might also be the face of someone who knows what Russian history tells us about what happens to leaders who lose wars.

It has been said that Russians can only be governed by an autocratic, totalitarian system. That it's the only political language people understand and democracy can't work there. Maybe so. The people of Russia really haven't been given much of an opportunity to try anything else over the centuries, so we can't say for sure.

In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Russia has a history of defeats in major wars that has subsequently led to the demise of the reigning autocrat. There have been times when the people have risen up and made this happen and at other points, the system has come crashing down on itself. Sometimes, it's been a combination of the two.

One could point to Tsar Alexander I and Josef Stalin as examples of two men who successfully steered Russia / the USSR through international conflicts successfully — the Napoleonic Wars and World War 2 respectively. They are remembered with a unique mix of fear, reverence and hatred.

However, victories on the international stage have been the exceptions rather than the rule for Russian leaders. The last 2 centuries of military history has produced two major victories, but it has produced far more major defeats.

Russia, as a nation state, is crumbling and has been for a long time. A declining and ageing population, a health care system in shambles, rampant alcohol and drug abuse, a botched Covid response and a declining quality of life, which in its vast rural areas was never that good anyway. The internet and airplanes have done little to bridge the gap between urban centres and its vast hinterlands.

The place is in deep trouble, with or without a foreign war.

Vladimir Putin is not the first Russian leader to use war as a way to manufacture unity, enforce national identity and prop up a collapsing country, while promising to correct perceived past humiliations at the hands of foreign governments.

Tsar Alexander I was on the throne when his Russian armies crushed Napoleon and his French ones. He survived until 1825, when he died in a fog of insanity and typhus but he is remembered as the ruler that ended the French threat.

His successor, Tsar Nicholas I died in 1855 during The Crimean War in which Russia was defeated. The results of the war laid bare the inadequacies in the Russian political, social and economic system when compared with the other European powers.

This motivated his son, who inherited his title, to issue some reforms; the most significant of which was the end of serfdom and the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 — just before the freeing of the slaves in the United States.

Despite this, Alexander II, the "Tsar Liberator", was assassinated in 1881 at the height of discontentment in the empire that was given a push by Russia's fortunes in the Crimean War. The freeing of the serfs from their medieval obligations to landowners did not produce the hoped for results. Russia did win a subsequent war in the Balkans against the Ottomans in the late 1870s, but was not seen to make the kind of gains that equaled the sacrifice demanded of the peasantry.

Russia and Japan faced off in 1903 in a war in the Pacific and this resulted in the defeat of Russia. Japan had industrialized rapidly by the end of the 19th century in a way that Russia had not. Woeful unpreparedness and underestimation of the Japanese as well as an inability to get troops and naval forces to the Far East quickly combined to sink the Russian fortunes in the war. It marked the first defeat of a European power by an Asian one and laid bare the inadequacies of the Russian political, economic and social system. An attempted but disorganised revolution followed in 1905, but was put down by Nicholas II's military.

He would be on unsteady ground from then on.

He and his family would not survive World War I. Again, the inadequacies of Russian industry and agriculture to equip and feed the army, as well as a reliance on rural peasantry and urban factory workers to endure privations during the war effort, led to the overthrow of Nicholas II as Tsar. Nicholas himself went to the front to command his forces and as things progressed from bad to worse, so did the Russian people's regard for the Tsar.

A revolution led by Liberal Democrats in February of 1917 (who chose to continue with the failing war effort), followed by a revolution by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October ended the Tsarist system and Nicholas's life. Lenin's promises of Bread, Peace and Land provided a message that no neither Nicholas, nor the Provisional Government that ruled briefly, could.

Nicholas and his family were killed by the Bolsheviks and Russians embarked on an entirely new course which had never been tried before. The ensuing civil war led to the victory of the Red Army and the establishment of the USSR. We could say that Lenin won that one, so maybe here he joins Alexander I and Stalin in the victors' circle.

World War 2 is remembered in Russia as the heroic struggle against Nazi fascism. Josef Stalin gets the credit for this one, rightly or wrongly, as he cajoled, prodded and otherwise forced his people into action against the invaders, to the tune of 20 million dead comrades. It's important to remember however, that the USSR lined up on the side of the Nazis in 1939 shortly before the breakout of hostilities. This unholy alliance led to the dismemberment of Poland and continued until the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941.

That Stalin was nowhere to be found in the first week of this onslaught is often forgotten.

By the time we get to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962, Nikita Krushchev is calling the shots as the General Secretary of the Communist Party. A classic Cold War confrontation between the Soviets, who saw an opportunity to benefit from the Cuban Marxist Revolution and install their missiles just a short distance from the United States, who did not want this to happen. In the showdown between President Kennedy and Krushchev, the latter blinked and backed down.

This probably saved the world, but it did not go over well in the Politburo and by 1964, Krushchev was out and Leonid Brezhnev was in.

It was under Brezhnev that the Soviets involved themselves in wars all over the world during the Cold War. These were mostly proxy wars in which intelligence, arms and training was provided to pro-Communist forces, often in newly independent countries. Afghanistan, which they invaded to prop up a Communist dictatorship in 1979 would be different and the USSR became mired in a costly war which it could never win. A simultaneous arms race with the US bankrupted the country. That, and the withdrawal of the Soviet forces in 1989, is part of what would lead to the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev and the Communist Party and the end of the USSR.

Russia now finds itself in a potentially intractable struggle in Ukraine. Whatever happens, it is certainly not going as quickly or as smoothly as Putin has hoped. Rumours of his demise and questionable mental state are probably not accurate and we can be sure that he has more moves up his sleeve. That said, nothing else will happen until and if Ukraine is defeated. That could take a while and Russians — common people and oligarchs alike — could lose patience.

Based on this historical prologue to what is happening currently, one wonders if Vladimir Putin will be one of the few rulers to guide Russia through a conflict with his life and political aspirations intact. Or, if he will go the way of all Russian autocrats that preceded him who dragged their country into wars over the last century and a half.

He has to win. He knows what happens if he doesn't.

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