Regrettably, Americans, including the elites running the government, are so dismissive of the culture and historical experience of other countries that the operating assumptions behind many of Washington’s foreign moves are dead wrong. Is it any wonder that policies built on sand go awry?
I direct attention to the view widely held by numerous pundits in the media and probably traceable back to hand-outs they received from the State Department that Zelensky’s incursion, now invasion of the Kursk province (oblast) of the Russian Federation dealt a grave humiliation to Vladimir Putin, showing up as it did that Russian defenses are flimsy and that the Kremlin cannot provide proper security for its citizenry. We find this not only in print media but also on such broadcasters as the BBC whose Moscow bureau chief Steve Rosenberg ran a series of interviews a couple of days ago pointing to Putin’s loss of stature as a result of the Ukrainian capture of 1,000 square kilometers (now 1,200 sq.km) of territory within Russia’s universally recognized borders. It is widely believed that if Putin fails to hold up his side of the bargain with the Russian people in a supposed exchange of freedom for security, then he will be overthrown. Such turmoil within Russia would provide opportunities for the West to reassert its control over the big neighbor to the East.
Then as a contributing factor to some hoped-for collapse of popular support for the ‘Putin regime’ Western commentators are counting on a revolt of Russian mothers over their drafted sons finding themselves under enemy fire, as some are now in Kursk, given the promises from the Kremlin at the start of the Special Military Operation that conscripted young me would not be doing any fighting. Of course, that promise was undone when the Ukrainians marched into Russia proper and brought war precisely to the young draftees.
The problem with these evaluations of the Russian popular mood is that they totally ignore what we know from Russian history.
We can talk about the sharp rise in patriotism in Russia and readiness for self-sacrifice of the broad population that came in June 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, a surge that lasted the duration of World War II. But let us go back further in time to Napoleon’s invasion of 1812.
An excellent book on the subject was published in 2016 by the man I consider to be the greatest living historian of tsarist Russia in the West, Dominic Lieven, entitled Russia Against Napoleon. The book was prepared for the bicentary commemoration of the war and was remarkable for the author’s extensive and productive use of Russian archives. But Lieven set for himself broader tasks than sharing his archival findings on the Russian reserves of horses for the cavalry, important as that was given that the cavalry was the tank column of the day. He also looked at the war from the perspective of its greatest Russian chronicler, Lev Tolstoy, whose War and Peace profited from the novelist’s conversations with still living Russian veterans of the Napoleonic wars.
The point Lieven was making is that precisely the invasion of Russian heartland by Napoleon in 1812 gave the more than 15 year intermittent fighting between ancien régime Russia and revolutionary France a wholly different character from what preceded and what followed 1812. Before1812, the battles between the tsar’s armies and the French armies were fought in Central Europe alongside Alexander’s allies Prussia and Austria in accordance with the rules of war that had been practiced in the 18th century between rival empires or nation states. This period gets rather cursory treatment by Tolstoy because it was not of passionate interest to his readers. The fight to free their invaded country in 1812 was of a wholly different nature, being a war of national liberation with a great deal of fighting by irregulars, or what we would today call partisans. This period constitutes the bulk of War and Peace. For the same reasons, Tolstoy ended his novel with the expulsion of the French and their allied troops from the Russian land. There was no follow-up to 1815 and Waterloo, because this was not of great interest to the Russian reader.
Moving this observation to our present day, we may say that the Special Military Operation has enjoyed some degree of popular support in Russia insofar as its mission was explained not in geopolitical terms but in terms of support for the Russian speaking population first of Donbas (Donetsk and Lugansk), and then also of Novorossiya (Kherson and Zaporozhiye oblasts). We may liken this to the military support of the Russian noble classes for fellow Orthodox Balkan peoples in the last quarter of the 19th century during their wars of liberation from Ottoman Turkey. This was an enthusiasm mainly shared, as I say, among Russian noblemen and the best educated strata, not among the entire Russian nation. The equivalent SMO sign-up of volunteers to fight against Ukraine that has been running at 30,000 per month for more than a year is noteworthy but not only as a display of patriotism. A significant factor has been the large financial incentives offered to the new kontraktniki, reaching presently to as much as the ruble equivalent of 10,000 euros at sign-up plus handsome pay during the stay on the field of combat. For many ‘volunteers,’ this is more money than they have ever seen in their lives.
What the Ukrainian incursion, now described in Russia as a NATO invasion of their country because it is being guided by NATO officers, is doing is to generate a far deeper surge of patriotism for the purposes of defending their own homes and driving out invaders. There is, correspondingly, an uptick in volunteers signing up to fight and we may expect that the Russian nation will rally around Putin and his government with still greater gusto. The ‘war economy’ will surely spread further out in society.
I am not surprised that Russia has been slow to stage its counter-move in Kursk even as it steps up its offensive in the Donbas theater, where it is making substantial daily progress by capturing key logistical centers of the Ukrainian front around Pokrovsk. It is a good moment for Russia to make a breakthrough on the main line of confrontation, and to let the new 160 km long front in Kursk stagnate for a while as it generates ever higher levels of popular commitment to the war effort. At the moment of its choosing, Russia will bring down the sledgehammer on Ukrainian troops inside Kursk and recover its control over its borders.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024