Putin is Evil, But He Won't Win

“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.”

UN Declaration of Human Rights, 1948

“Because you don’t save, Mr. Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don’t know yet what money is. Money is power, when you have lived as long as I have. I know. I know. If you but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put but money in thy purse.

Iago, Stephen murmured.”

Ulysses, James Joyce, 1922

“Putin murdered my husband.”

Yulia Navalny

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THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. INVESTING IS RISKY AND OFTEN PAINFUL. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH.

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Russia is not complicated. What happened to Navalny is not complicated. But the simple truth is so deeply unfamiliar to my non-Russian readers that many struggle to grasp the essence. Our entire modern structure—-laws, norms, wealth—-stands on the edifice of extinguished medieval habits. What’s largely dead in the West is alive and well in Russia. That’s what killed Navalny. 

Arbitrary, obscene violence of the ruler against the ruled or citizen against their neighbor has been so meaningfully quelled in the West that when these medieval behaviors do reappear—as they did in Germany in the 1930s or when a serial killer like Jeffrey Dahmer strikes—-it sparks outrage, study, and fascination. This is the core idea and the continued relevance of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published in 1886, a time when the modern world was coming into view but the medieval world was still only a few generations distant. 

The first year I lived in Russia, I too struggled to grasp just how barbaric their political traditions were. Surely, I thought, people are people and are more similar than different, right? It took two more years of living there and marrying a woman born in the remote town where Navalny's mother is now trying to obtain her son’s body for me to shift my thinking.

Despite possessing nuclear weapons, and world-class chess players and ballerinas, I realized Russia’s political mentality is about 500 years behind. In many parts of the world, the closest a person comes to glimpsing this mentality is when they stare at the accouterments of a knight or a shogun in a museum.

In Russia, there is an evil king, wired like Dahmer. Maybe Navalny thought he would be treated like Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn, harassed but not slaughtered. Once you cross paths with this medieval way of thinking, most never forget. That’s what Navalny was trying to change.

Maybe that is what’s happening now, a collective gasp that Putin is indeed that scary. Feel that unsettled feeling in your bones, as if your neighbor was the guy stalking women out on Gilgo, Long Island. When the Soviets advanced on the Nazis, Polish and German women understood instinctively what it meant: they would be brutally raped by advancing Russian troops. 

My thinking began to evolve in the fall of 1991. I had just moved to Moscow and didn’t yet intuitively grasp the written and unwritten rules. I got an urgent call. My father had fallen deathly ill. I needed to rush home. In Russia, you need permission to leave (in the US and Europe, by contrast, they fight to keep people out). A stamp was incorrect on my passport and the Russians forbade me to exit.

A frantic series of calls to the US Embassy later, a held plane, a severe warning, and I was allowed to leave, due to extenuating circumstances and a lull in the cold war. That night, I walked around Helsinki in a mild euphoria. I was free. Russia is hundreds of millions of such indignities. An American passport never felt so special.

The murder of Navalny is Biblical. Swap Jesus for Navalny and Caesar for Putin. It’s the same thing, a medieval code of cruel justice, murdering the truth-teller. Putin is horribly corrupt, just like Navalny said. While in life Navalny was, like all of us, flawed, in death he is flawless. 

The ancient world elicits curiosity when it is confined to the screen, thus the appeal of The Hobbit, or A Game of Thrones. But in real life, the terrifying indifference to human life of such systems is evil, pure and simple. On the lawn of the Russian White House after the 1993 coup, I recall staring at soldiers’ bodies, stacked like cordwood. That’s also a medieval code. The individual, particularly a corpse, has no rights. The UN Declaration of Human Rights drew from the US Bill of Rights and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, written in fury and indignation against arbitrary rule hundreds of years ago. Russia today has not reached the same stage of political development as 18th-century France.

If it weren’t for nuclear weapons and oil, Russia would be largely irrelevant, the way Pakistan or Angola are largely irrelevant. What matters in the 21st century is chips, lithography, fabs, global supply chains, capital markets, rule of law, and competitive labor markets. Russia does not have any of these. That’s why Putin will lose. Money is power, just like Joyce said, and the future cash flows of a country whose close friends are Iran and North Korea are not good. That Xi sticks close to Putin is all you need to know about the investment outlook for China. 

The Russian elite on some basic level knows they are backward. That’s why the elite send their children abroad. This recognition of Russia’s primitiveness is where their deep insecurity comes from. Another true story. On my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday, my wife, son and I traveled to Moscow. This was almost 15 years ago. 

At dinner, a close family friend asked my then-adolescent son what he made of Moscow, a city he had been born in but never lived in. My son paused, thought for a bit, and then said the following: “There is a thread of insecure nationalism that runs through every conversation.”

The Russians went quiet. Then our family friend responded, “How did he figure that out so quickly?”

If a sociopath steps into such primitive political traditions, he can do unfathomable harm. Putin takes pleasure in murdering people. That’s what is happening day-by-day in Ukraine and it is what happened to Navalny. 

The U.S. or Europe did not do anything wrong. Biden wanted to ignore Russia and focus on China and domestic spending to thwart Trump. Russia expert Andrew Weiss, here, described both Putin and the West’s policy challenges on the podcast.

The only thing that works with Russia is to starve them of technology and hem them in militarily. In this part of the world, might makes right. Putin won’t stop at Ukraine. Georgia or Latvia will be next. In Latvia, 25% of the local population is Russian. It won’t take much to fabricate a “human rights violation” that creates a pretext for Russia to “protect ethnic minorities.” Putin will gleefully recount how NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 to save Kosovar Albanians.

Mike Johnson might not yet realize how medieval leaders roll, but he will. He is exactly the type of American that fails to grasp Russia’s essence. If the US doesn’t pony up, Ukraine will fall. It will take some time for the Kremlin leviathan to digest such a large meal but, when it does, rest assured it will slither forward until, at that point, all the spectacular blaze of modern weaponry will be brought to bear, at much greater cost.