Vladimir the Great?

This last week or so, the news has been pretty terrible. How did the human race get here? Some of the problems of history arise from how we remember the past and glorify violence. The very famous Macedonian and Greek king Alexander ‘the Great’ lamented when he ran out of lands to conquer. Under both Peter ‘the Great’ and Catherine ‘the Great’, Russia expanded its territory. The Roman Empire conquered great regions of the world and crucified people who got in its way, yet Julius Caesar and Augustus will never be forgotten. Let’s not forget the British Empire! Was that not a series of invasions and did we in Britain not grow up exalting its ‘heroes’? Even the evil Herod in the New Testament was known as ‘the Great’. None of that was so great, was it? This is why a critical reading of history is so important and if a few statues bite the dust, so be it.

Maybe we should stop referring to these people as ‘great’. There will always be a Hitler or a Putin who think that the way to greatness is to expand their nation's sphere of influence without any human concern for the countries that they conquer. Vladimir Putin the Great? Not from where I’m standing and, fortunately, most of the world agrees with me. He is not only wrecking Ukraine, he is driving his tanks through all reasonable human aspirations for justice, peace, and the preservation of the environment.

Putin’s policy is particularly horrible, and he has emerged – like Hitler – in a supposedly democratic country as a tyrant, with a mission to restore what the previous generation lost. He thinks that thereby he is ‘great’. He wants to leave a legacy. But Russia needs to wake up to the fact that other European countries have had to live with the loss of empires and move on, and that nations across the world quite reasonably crave their freedom while accepting their equal and mutual interdependence with others. The empire, ruled by military might, is a monstrous concept that should have passed away into history by now.

For those over 50, the Ukraine invasion will revive memories of the feelings of anxiety caused by the Cold War. The Soviet Union (which was dominated by Russia) invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 for much the same reason as it has now invaded Ukraine: these satellite countries, as the Soviets perceived them, were becoming too liberal, and threatening to face west instead of east. Those invasions were not very bloody, as the tanks rolled in with overwhelming force and little resistance. Poland was also under threat of something similar in the 1980s, and the Polish communist leadership only persuaded the Soviet tanks to stay away by imposing their own martial law.

As a child, my very first memory of knowing anything about the grown up world of the news was in 1962, when we had the Cuban missile crisis. Then, as now, there were widespread fears that the situation could get out of hand and develop into nuclear exchange. Famously and thankfully, it didn’t. But the anxiety continued with every sharp word that was exchanged between East and West during that period. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 was another critical moment. It feels as though we have gone backwards very fast.

For my generation and the next one older, the post-war generations, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events of the years 1989-1991 made us feel as if a huge weight was lifted off our shoulders. In the Soviet Union, Russia presided over fifteen republics, one of which was Ukraine, and ruled over Eastern Europe generally, the so-called Warsaw Pact; these countries and republics became independent between November 1989 and December 1991. With some horrible exceptions – the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which were, at least, relatively short-lived – the 1990s were the politically happiest decade of our lifetimes; it seemed that, all within a few years, we had resolved those issues nearest to the hearts of people in the U.K.: the Iron Curtain, apartheid in South Africa, and the Northern Ireland situation. The Middle East remained the major outstanding world problem, along with Korea.

The decade of resolutions came to an end with the 9/11 bombings in 2001. The twenty-first century has been pretty dicey since then. And now it has been heart-breaking to see the thirty year peace in Eastern Europe shattered. The Russian government are all children of the Soviet Union. Some of them, like Putin, were in the feared secret police, the KGB. Clearly, they lament the end of Russian dominance over the other fourteen republics and want to ‘make Russia great again’. That kind of naïve nationalism has been the rallying cry during the last decade. It has been a pretty miserable time from the global perspective, a time of growing regression against the progress of the previous half-century.

Putin has proved that communism as such wasn’t really the problem during the Cold War. In the 1980s, I remember reading a book by someone called Herbert Butterfield entitled Christianity and History. Butterfield pointed out – to the surprise of people who thought that communism represented the threat and had a romantic view of the czarist regime that preceded it – that Russia had presented a threat to the rest of Europe for a great deal longer than since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, an enmity which had only temporarily ceased during the wars with Germany. In the 1850s, in the Crimean War, Britain and France fought successfully to defend Ottoman Turkey from Russia (ironically, in the First World War sixty years later, Britain and France were on the same side as Russia and fought against Turkey). Popes were particularly concerned about the danger that czarist and Orthodox Russia posed to Catholic regions in Eastern Europe. Now, thirty years after communism died in Eastern Europe, Western Europe faces Russia yet again.

That is not to say that the West is squeaky clean, not by a long shot. The U.S. and U.K. both sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years. In Iraq, they argued that they were removing a dictator, while they had supported even worse dictators in Latin America in the period up until the 1990s. In reality, it was all about oil and global strategy. The moral message might be better made by nations that have not pursued their own ambitions and interest worldwide for generations. But at least we in the U.K. can say this without fear of being prosecuted (sworn at by the odd troll, perhaps!). Our media relentlessly pursue our leaders when they are foolish or self-serving; remember Donald Trump denouncing the media for ‘fake news’? You won’t get this in Russia; just yesterday they brought out new laws persecuting and shutting down critical media channels. Trump will be very jealous! He tried to shut down the media and the democratic process, but failed (just!). No wonder he liked Putin and Kim Jong-Un.

One wonders how far Putin was encouraged by the hapless Trump who visited him and said complimentary things despite the occupation of parts of Ukraine from 2014 and the Salisbury and other poisonings. Trump changed his mind when he got home and the advisors got to him. A nation that elects a leader that foolish might not prove much of an obstacle in Putin’s mind. The charge that the Russians manipulated the Trump election and the Brexit referendum in the U.K. makes perfect sense. But the attack on Ukraine is so shocking that there is little chance that the Russians will keep the West divided as has been their government’s intention. Joe Biden’s recent speech to the United States made the point; the tensions in American and British society will take a back seat for a while, very fortunately for Boris Johnson. The Met Police and the Kremlin have taken the heat right off him.

We watch disasters on our television screens regularly, feel sympathy and send money, but none so far have touched us quite as much as the one happening now in Ukraine. It has reminded us what war means when it is the ruthless invasion of a country by a much more powerful one: lives, livelihoods, families, and communities shattered, refugees carrying only a small fraction of their belongings, years of building destroyed in an instant. It is also very close to home: Ukraine is not far away on a global scale, and this invasion will put huge pressures on everyone’s economy. Doesn’t Putin know that we have not yet recovered from Covid and have a climate crisis on our hands?

Putin and his government, the children of the late and not-lamented Soviet Union, are determined to occupy Ukraine, or what will be left of it when they’ve finished. Putin might have forgotten that the Nazi armies in the 1940s surrounded his home city of Leningrad (St Petersburg) and tried to starve it into submission. They failed. But this is what Putin is trying to do in Ukraine. Far short of being the man to remove Nazis, he is looking very much like one himself. The last time we saw such merciless destruction in Europe carried out by a powerful country was when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

We can only pray that the Russians come to a stop or we will be close to the war that the post-war generations feared during the Cold War of 1945-89. We should pray for a wholesale conversion of the citizens of Russia and Belarus (where there has already been a movement for change), so that they become twenty-first century nations with abhorrence of violence and respect for the aspirations of other nations for self-determination. Friends, trading partners, not subjects. We may have to wait for someone to overthrow the present regime, and assign it to the dustbin of history.

So, while we pray for Ukrainians, let’s also pray for those Russians and Belorussians who yearn for that enlightened twenty-first century Russia and Belarus. If they prevail, like Gorbachev who led the Soviet Union in the 1980s to accept the peace and freedom of its former territories, they will become the heroes of the generations to come. Somewhere, hidden away, Vladimir or Olga the Truly Great is organising a movement for change in Russia at huge risk to themselves, so that we can get back to the pressing issues of the twenty-first century that concern us all and which require us all to work together.