The Inertia of Evil

Russia knows its war is lost, but can't stop itself.

It’s reasonable to assume that most people in and around the Kremlin understand by now, Day 19 of their war, that Ukraine will not be “denazified and demilitarized.” That most Ukrainians are not waiting to embrace Russian soldiers as liberators. That they won’t, to cite a typical propaganda note sent my way from Moscow, “themselves catch and chase out the Neo-nazis, Volkssturms and National Battalions in order to establish peace.” That if the Russian military “wins,” it will take over a wasted, hostile land with scant means to occupy, much less rebuild it.

Yet the war goes on, becoming more deadly, savage and pitiless by the day. Why? That’s an important question, with relevance far beyond Russia.

The simplest answer is it doesn’t matter a hill of beans what anyone else in the Kremlin thinks. It only matters what one person, Vladimir Putin, thinks, and who can guess at that? That won’t quite do. One man can’t physically engineer a huge war, after all. Lots of people have to cooperate.

I’ll buy that the Russian soldier in the field, who has to follow orders or be court-martialed, can’t do much about the decisions that control him. But there is a circle of a few thousand people, maybe more, that might do something. At least they might resign and refuse to take part. None of them seem to have.

No one who matters in Russia blinked, as far as we know, on February 24, when Putin plainly crossed the line from standard diplomatic badinage and brinkmanship to what would inevitably become war crimes. Not Sergei Lavrov, the well-traveled foreign minister. Not Dmitri Peskov, the urbane, multi-lingual presidential spokesman. Not Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who used to be popular as a bluff, straight-shooting general type. Not anyone from the intelligence services, whose job in theory is to study reality. Not a single ranking “journalist” from the state television.

They all went back to work that morning with redoubled effort. They have remained there since, even as one illusion after another crumbles. How come?

A certain hard core undoubtedly believes that restoring historic Russia is worth a little bloodshed. And a little bloodshed, by Russian historic standards, could be quite a lot. A few may buy Putin’s argument that NATO is bent on using Ukraine as a platform to conquer Russia, and he has launched an essential pre-emptive strike.

Once battle is joined, the best of us are subject to a primitive blood-lust macho. It doesn’t matter anymore why the war started; our side has to win it. By this dreadful but hard-to-resist logic, marching into Mariupol over tens of thousands of civilian corpses is a triumph. Lifting the siege and retreating would mean humiliation.

But the heart of the matter may be simple inertia: the inertia of evil. Once you’re embedded in a group that gives you prestige, importance, camaraderie of a shared mission, and sweet material benefits, it takes enormous energy and courage to get out. More than most people have. Lavrov, Peskov or Shoigu could not exactly make a lateral career move to a competing autocracy. Some rationalization will always be at hand to avoid such a rupture and maintain the status quo: Why didn’t Mariupol just surrender? Those tens of thousands of dead civilians are their fault.

It’s not only in Russia that evil gathers its own awful momentum. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan fought on long after they were clearly beaten, at the cost of millions of lives. The Vietnam War dragged on for years after U.S. policy makers understood it could not be won, as Nixon sought his “peace with honor.” Three U.S. diplomats made news quitting over George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq. The other 13,000 or so apparently stayed put.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” the great muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair wrote a century ago. Under today’s circumstances, the conclusion is rather worse: It is nearly impossible to get a man (or woman) to stick their necks out, even or especially when they do understand they have become part of something terrible.

This is not the moment to wax self-righteous, however, for those of us sitting at safe distances with relatively easy choices before us. Would we really do better enmeshed in a bargain that by stages turned Faustian? Do all you can for Ukraine, by all means. But spare a moment to think about whom and what you are beholden to, what it would take to break that bond, what the cost would be and whether you are willing to pay it.

Put all that thinking in a mental, or moral, box and keep it somewhere safe. You may need it one day.