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You can’t understand Russia and China, including last week’s Moscow meeting between Xi and Putin, without context. An expert, like this week’s podcast guest, Andrew Weiss, also helps. He is a senior member of the Carnegie Endowment and author of the recently published Accidental Czar, the Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin.
So does some historical perspective.
Photo: Pavel Byrkin via Sputnik/Getty/Foreign Policy
Putin’s decision to slaughter tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians and Xi’s open embrace of this bloodletting makes no sense if you believe modern rules and economic motivations hold sway. But it makes a lot of sense if you believe Game-of-Thrones, pre-modern rules organize the world. Much of what many of us regard as normal is in reality modern, thus new and a significant deviation from the pre-modern before.
In 1850, there were 1.5 billion people in the world. Most didn’t live past 40. Almost everyone spent their days extracting food from muddy fields or chasing it across a grassy plain. Then, in a remarkably short period of time, everything changed. Trains severed corridors through social, political, and economic arrangements that were hundreds and sometimes thousands of years old.
Imagine what thoughts passed through the minds of the last independent native California tribe, the Modoc, in the 1870s when they fled into caves high up in the mountains to avoid capture or death. They must have regarded the new, gold-obsessed settlers the way we would aliens. For the elite in Washington, Paris and London directing these shifts, this was a period of exciting change. They carved up the world with canals—the Suez (1859-1869) and Panama (1904)—and seized entire contents, like Africa. For those societies trying to adapt to this new world, however, social structures disintegrated, leading to decades of chaos.
That is the backdrop against which it is best to assess Russia and China today. In China, thousands of years of rule by the emperor collapsed in 1912, followed by decades of chaotic, bloody Civil War and occupation. In Russia, the entire social structure collapsed in 1917 followed by decades of internecine murder. Each country adopted “Marxism,” which really means a) rule by a chief b) factories, electricity, immunization, literacy c) mind control. The 1932 poster below brags that the literacy rate in Leningrad was higher than in London or Berlin.
Poster: 1932 via The Guardian and Corbis.
The poster is revealing. The insecure nationalism (we are also literate!!!) evident here remains today. For sure, Putin and Xi are desperate for global approval and terrified that they are in fact running backwaters. This insecurity is mixed, paradoxically, with utter disdain for what modernity actually looks like, including financial turbulence, gay marriage and personal responsibility.
Andrew is a return visitor. He told me Russia “was a largely peasant society that rapidly urbanized in the early 20th century and so people are only one or two generations removed from this more subsistence resistance.”
In pre-modern Russia, “you never knew if you were going to make it through the winter each year and were right on the edge of not surviving, the people in that society who came along with innovative proposals and would say ‘hey, why don’t we rotate the crops and we will get better yields,’ those people were not welcomed with open arms in a lot of traditional Russian society.”
This hostility to the outside continues to this day, said Andrew, and helps explain why 70% of Russians passively follow Putin’s lead and believe his lies, like that NATO provoked this war. As regular readers know, my mother-in-law, who I spoke with this morning, is among Putin’s ardent followers. “We are all sure that Russia will prevail, though it may take until…2025,” she predicted today. I asked her if Ukraine, where her older sister lives, had a right to exist.
“I can’t say,” she responded, “that’s a painful question. I need to think about it.”
Andrew finds the world’s assessment of Putin is “overly generous” about the accidental Czar’s actual capabilities. In reality, Putin arose from an “abundance of mediocrity.” The true issue may be my mothers-in-law’s struggles to think independently, and the millions like her. Negotiating with a medieval leader supported by such a crowd won’t work. The only logic that prevails is who has a superior capability for violence. Of course, in a nuclear-tipped world, that is now pretty much everyone.
My baseline case
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