PUTIN'S DADDY ISSUES (WHICH ARE HIS SOLDIERS' GREAT GRAND-DADDY ISSUES)
The Russian leader and his old cronies are dying to fight World War II again. Will their grandchildren die for them?
After America’s disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, it was commonplace to speculate that George W. Bush was trying to outdo his father, who had chased Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait 12 years earlier, but (wisely) refrained from marching on to Baghdad. Amid all the long-distance psychoanalysis of Vladimir Putin since his disastrous invasion of Ukraine a year ago, no one seems to have touched on his relationship with his father. Maybe it’s time.
Vladimir Putin Sr. was, of course, no president. He was, according to official legend, a humble worker in a railroad car factory, who raised his son in a rodent-infested communal apartment in Leningrad. But he was something almost as consequential to young Vladimir Vladimirovich: a World War II veteran. A wounded veteran at that.
Vladimir Sr., again per the official version, could have ducked the Great Patriotic War. He was older and had already served in the military. He volunteered for the front anyway when the war started, and was assigned to a sabotage unit that deployed behind German lines. He nearly died when a Nazi threw a grenade at him in close combat, and thereafter walked with a limp.
That was just part of the war’s impact on the Putin family. Nazi occupiers killed the current president’s maternal grandmother shortly after invading in 1941. A number of uncles disappeared on the battlefield. Most horrific of all, an older brother born in 1940 died of starvation as an infant during the siege of Leningrad. Again, this is all according to the official narrative disseminated since Putin came to power. The details are believable because they were so numbingly commonplace in the post-war USSR.
Born in 1952, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin grew up in the enormous shadow of these events. The Soviet state threw its full weight into keeping the bitter memories alive. As faith in Communism’s other achievements dwindled, the war became ever more important as psychic propaganda glue. The aging veteran bedecked with medals supplanted the rosy-cheeked worker or peasant as national icon.
The incessant reliving of World War II went beyond banal triumphalism. Suffering was celebrated as much as victory. Official legend harped on The People’s sacrifices, refusal to surrender when a lesser nation certainly would have. Above all, it packaged war memories as a lesson to post-war Soviets: Hitler might be gone, but Russia remained ringed by enemies bent on her destruction. The only means of survival was obedience, giving up butter for guns, living in a state of hyper-militarized proto-hysteria.
It’s all back now, at least to hear Putin and his satraps talk, three decades after the Soviet Union disbanded, and in the face of a most unlikely aggressor, Ukraine. The Kremlin line just after last February’s invasion dripped with superpower arrogance, assurance that Kiev’s puny resistance would quickly be overrun, and a faux concern with “liberating” Russian-speaking Ukrainians from “Nazi” oppression.
A year on, even the Kremlin can hardly pretend that Plan A is working. So propaganda has reverted to well-worn paranoid grooves: Zelensky and Ukraine are mere puppets for a U.S./NATO strategy to invade Russia and bring it under heel. Moscow has not attacked anyone (who could imagine such a thing?), but is defending itself with its fate as a nation at stake.
This argument, if you want to call it that, becomes increasingly shrill, not to mention offensive. “We see that Nazism in its contemporary form is again directly threatening our country,” Putin declared, commemorating victory at Stalingrad February 2. Sergei Lavrov, his normally choleric 72-year-old foreign minister, went one better, comparing the West’s designs on Russia to Hitler’s “final solution” for the Jews in Europe. Not a good sign from a functionary whose job is to keep lines open for eventual peace talks.
All this is just dusting off old reflexes for Putin and his septuagenarian contemporaries. After two decades of narrowing Russia’s power circle to a few of the boss’ old friends, we can assume they’re all in one generational boat. One boat with a last-gasp chance to grab a piece of their fathers’ glory. If Russia wasn’t facing a new darkest hour before February 2022, we’ll pretend that it was. If Russia isn’t fighting for survival against a better armed and organized invader, we’ll pretend that it is. Whatever the cost.
Against World War II’s scale, it seems reasonable to downplay Ukraine as a “special military operation.” The Battle of Stalingrad alone cost nearly 2 million casualties, most of them Soviet. (Stalin refused to evacuate civilians, and an estimated 40,000 of them died in the crossfire.) What’s 100,000 Russian casualties (or is it 200,000 by now?) in Ukraine compared to that? A nation with such endurance can of course subdue the pesky puppet Zelensky in the end, can’t it?
Putin’s problem here is that 70 year-olds don’t fight their own wars. The young men he needs to subdue Ukraine may live in a different nation, psychologically, than him and his coterie. Most weren’t born yet when the last hammer and sickle was lowered from above the Kremlin. Past exploits and grievances, no matter how enormous and painstakingly maintained, can fade over two generations.
There’s no way, in the country Putin has made, to accurately gauge young Russians’ willingness to die in Ukraine. But the signs are not positive for him. More young men fled the country than joined the army during the last “partial mobilization.” Among the friends and acquaintances we still have in Russia, abstract opinions about the war vary, but no one is eager to send their son. Two guys we know in the dangerous age group have left the country. Others are keeping their heads down, hoping student deferments or employment at strategic organizations will exempt them.
True, our circle may be tilted to rootless cosmopolitans in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Patriotism in Russia, as elsewhere, is likely to run deeper in the hinterland. But the Russian army per se has done precious little in Ukraine. Early fighting was spearheaded by militias from the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Those would be zealots who moved into the area after 2014 inspired by nationalism, something like Israel’s West Bank settlers. Their strength seems exhausted by now. U.K. intelligence estimated more than half the Donetsk militia was killed or wounded by last summer.
More recent offensives have relied on the Wagner Group, a proto-medieval bouillabaisse of mercenaries and penal colony convicts, who were promised freedom and a tidy sum of cash if they survived six months at the front. Wagner, in turn, seems close to shooting its wad, having depleted an estimated force of 50,000 to take one village of dubious strategic value, a place called Soledar. Its sinister boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, also seems to have gotten too big for his britches back home. He’s due to have his profile trimmed, at best.
Which leaves Putin, according to current intelligence, preparing a major offensive by his “regular army,” which means mostly the 200,000 or so troops “mobilized” last fall. Ukraine and its friends would be wrong to underestimate the threat. Other powers have prevailed with superior numbers and industry despite shaky troop and public morale. Abraham Lincoln endured anti-draft riots and a vocal pro-Confederate minority en route to total and devastating victory for the Union. The universal heroic dedication we all assume on the Ukrainian side may be part myth, too.
One thing is clear: However many Leopards and F-16s make their way to the battlefield or don’t, the next critical battle in Ukraine will take place within the mind of the Russian soldier. Putin’s idea of what goes on there may be tragically mistaken.
Me neither, alas. There's also a question of who might replace him ....
I prefer the technical military term of shooting his wad over culmination. But seriously, you have an important perspective in this article.