"When asked "How are you?", the average Russian usually answers with one word — normal. Life is normal when you are neither doing exceptionally well nor in exceptionally dire straits. It is somewhere between "I'm doing well" and "I'm fine", writes Alexander J. Motyl, a professor of political science at Rutgers University in Newark, for Foreign Policy.
"Normality — or the state of being normal — is obviously a relative term. What is normal for a Russian pensioner barely making ends meet is not normal for President Vladimir Putin and his entourage. Still, most Russians would probably agree that life is normal when you’re doing well financially, your kids don’t hate you too much, your spouse only drinks too much once in a while, and the authorities don’t usually bother you.
Putin’s fascist regime has put that normality to the test. Before Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, life was good for the average Russian — and for Russia’s elites. Now, four and a half years into the bloody war that is killing or wounding an estimated 1,100 Russian soldiers a day and pushing the country’s militarized economy toward collapse, life is anything but normal for Russians living outside the protected bubbles of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Now, even the residents of these two cities are beginning to experience firsthand the consequences of a conflict that for so long seemed distant and almost unreal.
A return to normality presupposes at least an end to the war. And that, in turn, largely presupposes the end of Putin. While Putin’s removal by coup is possible even as the war rages, it cannot end as long as Putin remains determined to wage it for his own personal and political survival.
But the connection between normality and war goes deeper than Putin and his determination to destroy Ukraine. Unfortunately for Russia and its neighbors, normality will always be susceptible to breakdown — and Russian aggression will always be possible — as long as two structural factors exist.
The first is Russia’s political culture and its sense of national identity. At the heart of Russian self-perception is a culturally established and deeply rooted belief that their country has a unique predisposition to greatness and a right to dominate other peoples. Thus, Russia's historical mission is the exact opposite of normality: its mission is not to rest on its laurels and enjoy life within its own borders, but to fulfill its historical destiny and spread Russian civilization — a messianic concept deeply rooted in Russian Orthodoxy but today largely devoid of religious content.
Variations of these views have been shared by imperial Russian officials and cultural figures (such as Fyodor Dostoevsky) as well as anti-communist dissidents (including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). The same views are shared today by Putin; Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church and believed to be a former KGB agent; Putin’s propagandist punching fist Dmitry Medvedev (known for his willingness to incinerate European capitals with nuclear weapons); the eccentric philosopher Alexander Dugin; the aggressive TV host Vladimir Solovyov; and dozens of other propagandists. Most Russians also share them — if not explicitly, then as part of the cultural environment in which they live. The fact that these views have dominated Russian public discourse for decades and even centuries suggests that something deeper is at stake — an enduring political and cultural norm, rather than a set of transient views.
Given this stubborn political culture, many Russians who strive for normalcy in their daily lives find it difficult to resist that culture’s claims to the greatness of their nation. Ultimately, this undermines Russians’ desire for ordinary, everyday normalcy. Is it possible for these cultural attitudes to change? Other nations that had megalomaniacal self-images were able to abandon them and turn their attention to everyday life only after suffering humiliating military defeats. Britain and France lost their empires; once-aggressive Germany and Japan were bombed into pacifism during World War II and then refocused their efforts on domestic prosperity. The United States may be learning its lesson today.
These examples suggest that Russia can accept normality only if it suffers a clear defeat at the hands of Ukraine. A ceasefire will not usually be enough. Nor will Putin’s departure. The defeat must be of such magnitude that even the most vocal supporters of Russian greatness begin to question their own beliefs. It is hard to imagine anything less than a spectacular collapse that would finally allow Russians to do what the Germans did after 1945: accept responsibility for their leader’s crimes and become ordinary citizens of the world.
The second factor preventing Russia from becoming a normal country is the Russian state — not the type of regime, whether imperial, Soviet, fascist, or otherwise, but the size and complexity of a political entity, which spans 11 time zones and is populated by a multitude of peoples with different cultures, religions, histories, and identities. Such a state is by its very nature imperial, with clearly defined metropolises and peripheral colonies whose inhabitants have the choice between being silent subjects, de facto collaborators, or persecuted dissidents.
Tsarist Russia was openly imperial; the Soviet Union, with its hypercentralized political and economic systems, was perhaps the apotheosis of empire; and Putin's Russia certainly remains an empire, both domestically and in terms of its ambitions in the region and beyond. All three empires pursued repressive policies toward their non-Russian subjects — from cultural repression to imprisonment, deportations, and genocidal war.
With few exceptions, the majority of ethnic Russians seem perfectly content with the imperial state. How many of them protested Putin's wars in Chechnya or the invasion of Georgia? How many were able to contain their excitement when Crimea became "ours" in 2014? How many Russians truly believe that Ukraine is an independent state with the right to choose its own path? How many refuse to fight in a genocidal war that is killing them at an alarming rate? (Surely being arrested for draft evasion is no worse than dying within about 30 minutes of being sent to the front.) The supposedly liberal opposition figure Alexei Navalny supported the Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, and before 2022 he expressed various nationalist and openly racist views towards non-Russians, only to reconsider his positions afterwards. Ukrainians like to say: "Scratch off a Russian liberal and you will find a Russian imperialist". This does not apply to everyone, but it does describe an unfortunately quite common Russian trait.
Repression alone cannot explain the huge difference in the level of protests between Moscow, Tehran and Kiev.
Empires inevitably decline, and Putin's project will be no exception. The reasons for the decline are many, but the main one is the dynamic between an imperial nation striving for greatness and colonized peoples, who inevitably question this claim when they acquire a certain degree of identity. After all, it was the Soviet revolutionary Vladimir Lenin who said that Russian chauvinism breeds non-Russian nationalism and separatism. But how should Russians, convinced of the greatness of their nation, respond to the demands of non-Russian peoples for greater autonomy and cultural identity that threaten the unity and size of the mighty imperial state and the political culture that sustains it? As the tsars, the communists, and now Putin have done in succession—greatness requires that non-Russian peoples be silenced. (The fact that some of these leaders themselves—like Joseph Stalin—are non-Russian does not invalidate the structure of their rule.)
Paradoxically, Russians have fallen into a vicious circle of their own making. Abandoning the political culture of greatness and imperialism would pave the way to normality, but it would also destroy one of the main sources of emotional satisfaction and national pride. Dismantling, or at least shrinking, the imperial state would go a long way toward the possibility of more normality, but that would require either a huge Ukrainian victory that would undermine the integrity of the current state or a Gorbachev-style perestroika that would loosen the internal ties of the empire.
Normality is not just a desirable goal for Russia. It is also of great importance to its neighbors. While neither a culture of greatness nor an imperial state are in themselves necessary or sufficient conditions for Moscow to start wars, both facilitate the incitement to war and make aggression much easier to present as acceptable to Russian elites and the public. They thus make war more likely. Let us imagine a hypothetical situation: would a normal Russia, stripped of its imperial culture and its all-powerful centralized state, launch a genocidal war against Ukraine? It is possible, but not likely.
The sad but inescapable truth is that Russia will pose an existential threat to its many neighbors, especially Ukraine, as long as its obsession with greatness continues — while normality remains only a daily aspiration, not a political goal.
A modern Cato, echoing his Roman predecessor's insistence that Carthago delenda est ("Carthage must be destroyed"), would probably be right if he declared: "Russia must be destroyed". But who, apart from the Ukrainians, the Baltic peoples, and the Poles, would agree? The Trump administration seems determined to restore Russia as a great power. Europeans are only now beginning to realize that Russia has already declared "hybrid war" — or, more accurately, war without the euphemism — on them.
Much of the rest of the world now perceives the United States as a greater threat than Putin's Russia.
This is the bad news. The good news is that while Putin is killing Ukrainian civilians in greater numbers, Ukraine’s determination to achieve victory remains undiminished, as does its ability to kill Russian soldiers faster than Putin can recruit them. The even better news is that Putin is effectively heeding Cato’s call by continuing a war that is undermining the economy, destroying vast numbers of Russian soldiers, demoralizing and angering its population, and demonstrating to the world that Russia is a great power left over from the past. Putin is destroying Russia.
Putin promised to make Russia great again. Instead, he is making it weak —so weak that its collapse under his self-destructive policies is becoming more likely with each passing day. Russians can be hopeful: once they give up the belief that their country and state have a special destiny of imperial greatness, they will finally be able to enjoy the normality they strive for.
Source: news.bg