Welcome to the New Cold War
The ideology of the Putin regime is hardly less toxic and is perhaps more incendiary than communist totalitarianism.
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“A nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought.” That and a promise to “ensure predictability” by “a Strategic Stability Dialogue in the near future” were the only things that Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin agreed on strongly enough to put in writing—in a 140-word joint statement, which was the sole tangible yield of the duo’s June 16 summit in Geneva, Switzerland.
Nuclear missiles and bombs are again the sum total of the relations between Russia and the United States. We are back to the pre-Gorbachev era. The “this is not the Cold-War” mantra is wearing thin. It is time to admit: It is a Cold War.
True, the enemy of the democratic West is not communist totalitarianism fueled by Marxist millennialism. Yet the ideology of the Putin regime is hardly less toxic and perhaps more incendiary. The normative gap between the liberal democracies and the system that Putin assiduously forged is already almost as deep as during the Cold War.
Contrary to the prevailing view, Putin’s domestic regime is not merely a corrupt autocracy founded on propaganda, political manipulation, and repression. These descriptions amount to dangerous oversimplification because they vastly underestimate Putin’s ability to bend to his will millions of his compatriots.
Over the past two decades he has ceaselessly and systematically reshaped Russia’s national identity: the ways in which Russians see themselves, their country, and their history. He has rewritten, updated, or reawakened the elements of his country’s legitimizing myths—what he calls “spiritual bonds” (dukhovnye skrepy)—and deployed them in ways that proved deeply satisfying to tens of millions of followers.
Far more a Soviet patriot than a Russian one, Putin had sensed that which pro-democracy revolutionaries of the late 1980s and early 1990s tended to disregard: the deep-seated trauma inflicted on Russians by the loss of what they believed was their country’s exalted status. They grieved the disappearance of the mission by which the Soviet Union defined and measured its exclusivity: to be the counterweight, moral as well as military, to the United States. Putin adopted that mission as his own and placed it in the center of his foreign policy. In the eyes of his compatriots, Putin took on the post-imperial geopolitical “smallness” of post-Soviet Russia and made it disappear.
A diminutive hooligan from the slums of post-war Leningrad, Putin absorbed two other core components of the Soviet identity: equating respect with fear and self-assertion with aggression. Three months after the Crimea Anschluss in 2014, Lev Gudkov, a leading Russian political sociologist and the director of Russia’s sole remaining independent national polling firm Levada Center, found that people believed that Putin had “restored the West’s respect for Russia. The population very much appreciates this.” The polls also found that almost 9 in 10 Russians believed that their country was feared and 3 in 4 thought it a good thing.
Among the most effective and most ominous of the “spiritual fasteners” is the militarist triad: Russia’s glory is in her military victories, her greatness is synonymous with her military might, and her nuclear weapons are the foundation of the respect the world pays it. The Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call World War II, has been elevated to the most important event in Russia’s history; Stalin’s presiding over the war now outweighs his crimes; and the May 9 Victory Day remains the main official holiday. Not surprisingly, along with the secret police, the FSB, and the presidency, today the Russian army is the “most trusted” institution among the Russian people.
Along the way, Putin has recovered the defining elements of the Cold War and made them part of the national credo: The conflict between Putin’s Russia and the West is not about normal competition among large states and occasional frictions about specific issues. It is about an incompatibility of values. Just as the Soviet leadership did, the Kremlin today perceives the struggle with the U.S.-led “West” as ubiquitous and global, whether in Georgia, Syria, or Ukraine. This contest is permanent, and the West’s effort to undermine Russia is relentless.
Page after page is being borrowed from the Soviet propaganda playbook. Just as AIDS was “invented” by the CIA, COVID-19 was “genetically engineered” by the United States. Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said so two months ago at a parliamentary meeting attended by Putin.
More troubling still, the anti-West animus begins to surpass that displayed during the time of the Soviet Union. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, neither Stalin nor his successors ever denied the Allies’ contribution to the victory. In the Victory Day speech last month, Putin said that the Soviet Union fought World War II “alone.”
In another instance of the heightened enmity, Russia claimed to have shot at the British HMS Defender and dropped bombs “in her path” because it allegedly was in Russia’s territorial waters in the Black Sea. The British Ministry of Defense has denied the shooting and the bombing. But no matter: In Russia’s most popular prime-time talk show, Vesti Nedeli, Dmitri Kisilev (who is also the head of Sputnik, the main Russian state foreign broadcast service) told his audience that, egged on by the U.S., Britain was out to provoke a war. Next time, he warned, “we will sink any British ship that would want to repeat the provocation.” Two days later, in an annual “Direct Line” press conference watched by millions of Russians, Putin recast the episode in unmistakably existential terms: “We are fighting for ourselves, for our future.”
Exceeding Soviet propaganda in stridency is a sign of a disturbing difference between the two Cold War regimes. The Soviet system rested on the unshakable belief in the “science” of Marxist historical materialism, the confidence in the distant but inevitable victory of the “superior social organization” of socialism over the “rotting imperialism.” Just as importantly, the World War II victors and the engineers of the nuclear superpowership parity with America, the Politburo elders had little to prove and could rest on their laurels. Having known firsthand the horrors of war, they were wary of provoking a direct confrontation with the West. Lish by ne bylo voyny—anything but a war—was their refrain.
By contrast, since 2014, when Putin recast himself as a wartime president, a war or threat of war has been the key to his regime’s legitimacy. What my Russian colleagues called “militarized patriotism in peacetime” became the leitmotif of the Kremlin propaganda orchestra.
The tiger that Putin saddled must be fed fresh meat periodically. A second Cold War could turn out to be more volatile and flammable than the original edition.
Leon Aron is the author of a biography of Boris Yeltsin, among other books, and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Excellent piece. China may be a much more serious threat across the board (and serious country in general) but at least for now Xi's regime is a much more conventional and predictable player. Russia is far more likely to cause a serious systemic shock out of its irrationality or spite. China is the new mob boss edging in, but Russia is the aging biker obsessed with respect who doesn't care about consequences and is openly threatening us with a pool cue.
Two key points the piece touches on but deserve some further reinforcement.
First, the horrors of WWII deeply scarred the Soviet leadership, producing dangerous paranoia and an ever more militaristic state but also making men who had seen the results of war pull back from conflicts. The current generation of siloviki grew up with all of the ludicrous propaganda about the glories of the Great Patriotic War without any counterbalancing knowledge (other than Afghanistan, a Chechen war they pretend never happened and the occasional murdering of Syrians, Georgians and Ukrainians from a safe distance) and the Putinist state is doing the same to the younger generations. Old school 20th century jinogism is very much alive in Muscovite hearts, as proven by the popular reaction to the Donbass aggression.
Second, the Soviets officially and occasionally even individually were internationalists, however strong the layer of primitive blood and soil Russian nationalism was beneath. Soviets were told America was a hellhole of crime and oppression, but one created by a small group of capitalists. And while I'd argue that the Soviets *did* in practice frequently deny Western contributions to WWII, there wasn't a long standing real animosity against America to draw on. The current Muscovite regime under Putin draws liberally from the Soviet past but has no trace of the old internationalism -- its ideology is an an attempt to reconstitute late Czarist Imperial Russian nationalism, with some vague "Eurasianist" nods to acknowledge the population isn't all Orthodox Rus. That means its far easier to whip the populace into a frenzy against outsiders, and unlike during the Cold War Russian historical grievances are focused on the United States. Putin, his circle, and many even educated Russians of that generation have embraced a delusional and self-pitying narrative in which the Soviet Union could have transitioned instantly from being a Communist evil empire to a thriving, happy and unified Commonwealth of Independent But Ruled Happily From Moscow States but for the wicked West and NATO. In their moral weakness they blame everyone but themselves, but blame the United States of America above all. Never underestimate the real and sincere animosity Russians, even nice Russians with a flat in London, harbor towards America.
The Russian state's current and future rulers have an irrational hatred of America and Western democracies and a love of violence and chaos. The current Russian State embodies and modernizes many of the historical vices and flaws of the Czarist period, from xenophobia to fear of free discussion, and carries forward few of the historical redeeming characteristics of greater Russian civilization and culture. The ballets are sterile, the novels are trickling to a stop, the athletes are drug cheats and the scientific breakthroughs are in tech to sell to China and hacking tools to foment organized crime. The Church, as Kiev and Constantinople have realized, is a corrupt arm of the bureaucracy. There is nothing worth saving and nothing worth engaging.
China is a rising power with a poisonous ideology and a (somewhat justified but manipulated) sense of historical justice. China is a threat. Russia, for this generation, is a psychologically crippled and unpredictable enemy of the West. Russia is a cancer.
While Russia has an evil dictator at its head, it is not the once powerful USSR that could challenge the uSA in every sphere.
It’s gdp is 1.7 trillion, ours is over twenty trillion. It has a navy that is debilitated and rotting, our is revamped and still creating new ships far ahead of them. Their nuclear weapons are aging and ours will be going through updating. It is why Putin is relying on cyber espionage to spread his power, while hoping to still move into the Baltic’s.
This doesn’t mean Putin’s work of radicalizing the Russian people is not to be ignored. Germany itself went through radicalization before WWII, and Japan also. But currently what makes a Russia and her oligarchs a real threat is it’s ties to China. If war (God forbid) were to break out between the USA and China over Taiwan, having Russia in the mix would make things murky. Of course, hopefully we would have allies in the mix too.
But NATO is still there for Russia. We will need SEATO for China.
It is true that a Cold War is going. But it is a far stronger one with China at the moment who has its tendrils across the world that the former USSR had, where the current Russia does not.
But thank you for the update on an evil man, and how he is trying and continuing to warp the minds of a generation.