WAR AND APPEASEMENTWAR AND APPEASEMENT
Press conferences are supposed to make headlines, but on June 5, 2013, in Geneva I made a little more news than I had intended. I was there to receive the Morris B. Abram Human Rights Award from the organization UN Watch. It was a great honor to receive an award bearing the name of an American civil rights champion who worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy before becoming a global rights figure in co-founding UN Watch in Geneva.
At the press conference a reporter asked a question I have received hundreds of times since I retired from chess: whether or not I feared for my safety and freedom in Putin’s Russia. But this time I did not give my usual reply about nothing in life being certain. I answered that if I returned to Russia I had serious doubts I would be able to leave again, since it had become obvious in February that I would be part of the ongoing crackdown against political protestors centered on the Bolotnaya Square case.
“So for the time being,” I concluded (if I may quote myself to make the record clear), “I refrain from returning to Russia.”
This was not intended to be a grand declaration of leaving my home country, permanently or otherwise. In the context of the question, even the Russia experts among the journalists in attendance failed to pick up anything special about my cautious response. It was only when the Moscow Times reported it that the headlines and speculation began to fly.
I was simply expressing the dark reality of the situation in Russia at the time. Nearly half of the members of the opposition’s Coordinating Council were under criminal investigation on invented charges ranging from illegal protest to incitement of extremism to embezzlement. This difficult decision was already old news to my family and me; I had not been to my Moscow home since February. Even my fiftieth birthday in April was celebrated in Oslo instead of Moscow, as much as it pained me to make my mother and other close family travel abroad.
My work on the opposition council was generally foreign relations, which entailed lobbying governments and organizations abroad to condemn the human rights record of the Putin regime and to bring sanctions against Putin’s government and his cronies. Putin’s rage at the passage of the US Magnitsky Act legislation at the end of 2012 convinced me that this was the correct path, and a path that needed to be promoted in Europe as well.
The Moscow prosecutor’s office opening an investigation that would limit my ability to travel would have crippled these efforts. It would have kept me from my professional speaking engagements, all of which were abroad since my dissident status had denied me any possibility of earning an income in Russia. A travel ban would also have limited my work with the non-profit Kasparov Chess Foundation, which had centers in New York City, Brussels, Johannesburg, Singapore, and Mexico City to promote chess in education.
I doubt they would have just locked me up and thrown away the key, although that’s what we thought about Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Pussy Riot. It was more the fashion for the prosecutor’s office to inflict an endless barrage of charges, trials, and court appearances: death by a thousand paper cuts. It bankrupts the victims financially, physically, and spiritually and keeps them out of the limelight without martyrdom. It causes fear and paranoia in the target as well as in his family and friends. This is the technique they’ve used against Navalny for years.
When I retired from chess in March 2005 to join the opposition movement, my concept of uniting every anti-Putin element in the country to march together regardless of ideology was harshly criticized. Seeing the 2011–2012 marches with hundreds of flags representing every group from liberals to nationalists all marching together for “Russia Without Putin” was the fulfillment of a dream. But it was a brief dream followed by a rude awakening for the opposition and, sadly, the continued slumber of most of the Russian people.
For his uncontested return to the presidency Putin locked down the capital, turning the center of Moscow into Pyongyang. He has since shown no hesitation in persecuting activists, leaders, lawyers, scientists, or even musicians who dare challenge his power publicly. The phase of attempting to create popular outrage by going through the motions of sham elections was over. Despite the government propaganda, most Russians knew the system was a cruel joke, but this knowledge was not in itself sufficient to get millions of people to risk their safety and freedom against a well-armed police state.
I had also expanded my human rights work in an effort to create an international coalition of dissidents and activists. In 2012 I succeeded one of my heroes, Václav Havel, as the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) in New York. Thor Halvorssen, its tireless founder and director, has put together a remarkable series of global events and campaigns with an emphasis on uniting freedom fighters around the world. HRF’s annual Oslo Freedom Forum is the epitome of these efforts to bring human rights activists and dissidents together to share information and strategies.
I understood that I could not lead in Russia from outside of Russia and I’ve had to accept that. I’m still involved in the opposition and in some ways I’m busier than ever working for our cause. To those who have accused me of abandoning Russia, or of giving up, I say that Russia remains my country regardless of where I live or the papers I carry. I will not subject myself to the whims of the thugs and crooks who rule it for the time being. Russia is not Putin. I refuse to be an easy target or to be caged and limited to being little more than a figure of sympathy. It has been painful not to see my eldest son, Vadim, and my mother in Moscow very often, but Klara Kasparova gave me both her name and her fighting spirit, and so I will persist.
Two months later, President Obama, too, had personal issues with the Putin regime, canceling a summit meeting with Putin that had been set for August. There were many good reasons for Obama to make this choice, but most of the attention went to Russia’s granting asylum to the American fugitive National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden a few days earlier. The coverage reflected the short attention span and limited interest in Russia in the Western press, but it may also be accurate. After all, the list of ways Putin had worked against American and European interests was quite long already, with Syria, Iran, and missile defense on top. But previously Obama had been content to sit down across from Putin and spout the usual blather about cooperation and friendship. If it took a personal jab over the negligible figure of Snowden to at last rouse Obama to stand up to Putin, I suppose that doing the right thing for the wrong reason is better than never doing it at all.
It is human nature to want to put a face on our stories, whether or not it really fits. Like a footballer making or missing a penalty in the final seconds of a game, one individual often gets credit or blame when he is mostly just a diversion from more important stories. One person’s central role in a single incident ends up looking more important than the serious issues, which have been building for a long time, that the incident represents. That was the case of Edward Snowden, a traitor and spy to some and a whistleblower and hero to others. I have no special knowledge about his actions or his leaks, but I would surely feel differently about him had he not taken refuge in Russia, where his asylum request tacitly endorsed the dictatorial regime of his gracious host, Vladimir Putin.
My reaction is not only due to Snowden’s first statement from Russia, while he was still in legal limbo at Sheremetyevo airport, in which he included Putin’s Russia—a police state and patron of despotism worldwide—on his list of nations that “stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless.” Excuse me? Putin’s many political prisoners would disagree quite strongly, as would the many opposition members who have had their emails hacked and their phone calls recorded by the KGB in attempts to discredit them. And Snowden could have been more respectful of the many injured and dead among journalists and his fellow whistleblowers in Russia.
One note on Snowden’s NSA revelations, however, speaking as someone who grew up under the all-seeing eye of the KGB and who is fighting its modern rebirth under Vladimir Putin: it is exasperating to hear blithe comparisons between the NSA, and other Western spy or law enforcement organizations, and the vicious internal security regimes of the USSR and East Germany. The NSA is to the Stasi what a bad hotel is to a maximum security prison. It is not what a government does with data that defines it; it is what it does to human beings.
Any encroachment on the personal freedoms and rights of individuals by a government should be protested and debated, absolutely. The mechanisms to protest such abuses must be exercised regularly or they will be lost. But citizens behind the Iron Curtain were not terrified of the intelligence services because of data collection. We lived in fear because we knew what would happen to us if we gave any hint of dissent against the regime. And, as often as not, no data at all was required to persecute, disappear, torture, and murder potential enemies. If a court actually was involved, and evidence desired, it would simply be fabricated. And no, to take on the next argument I often hear, brutal totalitarianism does not begin with surveillance by a liberal democratic state. It begins with terror, it begins with violence, and it begins with the knowledge that your thoughts and words can end your career or your life.
Snowden’s acts and his appearance in Moscow had some impact in Russia, but it should not be exaggerated. I’ve heard claims that Putin learned of Snowden’s leaks, then passed his draconian new laws further restricting free speech as a way of “keeping up with the Joneses” at the NSA; it should go without saying that such claims are absurd. Dozens of those laws have been put into effect over Putin’s fifteen-year reign, gradually vandalizing the Russian constitution beyond recognition. Putin is always quick to exploit any opportunity to justify his authoritarian ways, but in many cases it is Western leaders and press looking to make excuses for Putin and to avoid calling him a dictator. This is a genetic strength and weakness of the free world, the desire to be “fair and balanced” and to “show both sides of the story” even when it means giving the benefit of the doubt to someone who hasn’t deserved it in over a decade. The Western press that never hesitated to refer to Pinochet as a dictator, and with good reason, somehow always finds more polite titles or euphemisms for Putin, the Castros, al-Assad, and even Kim Jong-un.
As for the estimation of Snowden among the Russian opposition, you must realize what his journey looked like in our eyes. The idea that an individual could carry out this espionage mission and then flee to China and take refuge in Russia without any involvement by the KGB is incredibly hard to believe. Combine these logical suspicions with his asylum claim and the aforementioned false equivalency between dictatorships and democracies and Snowden is hardly cut out to be a sympathetic figure among those who respect the universal nature of human rights.
All the attention for Snowden had a parallel in the sudden outburst of international condemnation of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games that were held in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi in February. Numerous protests, both online and in crowds in the United States, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere, were largely in response to the harsh anti-gay law passed in Russia in June 2013, a law with broad and open-ended powers to punish and discriminate against gays and anyone who would defend or even talk publicly about homosexuality. Its passage was of a piece with the constant encroachment on free speech and other constitutional rights in Putin’s Russia, and also in keeping with the Kremlin’s politically convenient, and quite unholy, alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church.
This “homosexual propaganda” law was only the broadest and most recent of many similar ones in a Russia where gays were the routine victims of both official and unofficial discrimination, harassment, and violence. That Russia is a signatory to various European and international conventions that forbid this sort of discrimination had been largely ignored by the European Union and its so-called leadership. So it was welcome to see artists, activists, and regular citizens stepping into the gap to stand up for Russian human rights, which of course is what gay rights are. Celebrities like Lady Gaga and Stephen Fry made public statements, including Fry’s eloquent letter to the International Olympic Committee and Prime Minister David Cameron to propose moving or boycotting the Sochi Games.
I was pleasantly surprised by this sudden rush of attention to a matter many of us in the opposition had been protesting since Sochi won the bid in 2007. Suddenly my Twitter mentions were full of LGBT-activism accounts sharing my scorn for hosting the Olympic Games in Putin’s bigoted autocracy. This was the mercurial power of social media in action. Serious comments about Russian democracy might be shared a few hundred times, but a photo of a rainbow over Sochi could go viral in ten minutes. As long as it helped raise awareness about the nature of Putin’s Russia, both methods were fine with me.
There were already many reasons Sochi should never have been awarded the Olympics. Its character as a subtropical summer resort with weather rarely nearing the freezing point is the most obvious. That Sochi was entirely without the required facilities when the Games were awarded on July 4, 2007, over Salzburg and Pyeongchang, added to the surprise. It was clear from the start that it would be a human and environmental catastrophe for the delicate region. Sochi also borders the North Caucasus, a hotbed of both Islamist terror and Russian military brutality, infamous for terror attacks in Ingushetia, regular bombings in Dagestan, and the horrific Chechen wars.
Many Sochi citizens had their homes and businesses destroyed, and the surrounding area was turned into an ecological disaster zone that only got worse after the area was abandoned a few minutes after the torch was extinguished.
The Putin regime is and always has been about one thing: money. Specifically, about how to move it into the bank accounts of Putin’s allies. Hosting the Olympic Games, a first for Russia, as Moscow 1980 was in the USSR, was a perfect way to shift tens of billions of dollars from the treasury and state-owned banks into private hands. Everything from infrastructure to venues and hotels to catering was done by companies hand-picked by the Kremlin, and it was no surprise to find the names of many of Putin’s closest pals “going for the gold” a bit early in Sochi. The price tag soared far beyond the promised $12 billion (already a record) to an estimated $50 billion, more costly even than the lavish 2008 Beijing Summer Games. According to the Economist, the companies of Putin’s old judo buddy Arkady Rotenberg alone received $7.4 billion in contracts. The entire 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympiad cost $6 billion.
Hosting the Games in Sochi was a dubious effort even if the classic old resort town were being turned into Xanadu with Putin as Kubla Khan. But due to epic levels of corruption, most of the money never even made it to Sochi. The construction was shoddy and many of the ambitious projects weren’t even scheduled to be built until after the Games. That is, they were never built at all, and they never will be. It is fair to say that Switzerland won the most gold from Sochi regardless of the success of their team.
The International Olympic Committee members must have possessed tremendous faith to entrust the Games to Sochi in the face of such obstacles. Many of my colleagues in the opposition and I protested the bid from the start. When the degree of the chaos and corruption became evident, we petitioned the IOC to move the Games to a different site, even to a less fragile one in Russia. That didn’t happen, of course, but the new wave of Sochi protests over the anti-gay law turned a bad situation into an opportunity to turn Putin’s showcase into a spotlight that exposed his cruel regime on a global stage.
As a lifelong professional sportsman, first for the Soviet Union and then for Russia, I could not endorse a boycott of Sochi by the Olympic teams. Such maneuvers unfairly punish athletes with no regard for their personal views. I was nearly a victim of “sports politics” myself more than once as a young man. In 1983, I was told I could not travel to Pasadena, California, to play a world championship candidates match against Soviet defector Viktor Korchnoi. The Soviet Sports Committee was already planning to boycott the 1984 Summer Games in nearby Los Angeles in retaliation for the US boycott of the 1980 Games in Moscow. I was initially forfeited for failing to appear and I was fortunate that eventually the match was relocated to London, where I won and continued my ascent to winning the crown in 1985. It is impossible to know what might have happened to my career had the forfeit stood and I had been forced to wait another three years to challenge Karpov.
I believe strongly in the power of sport to break down barriers and to cross borders. The focus should be on sport and the athletes, first and foremost. But sport is part of culture, of life, and there was an opportunity for the athletes and visiting fans and media to have a real impact on human rights in Russia. Everyone remembers the Black Power salutes raised by American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the medal podium in Mexico City in 1968. Sochi was ripe for similar gestures, although after a few minor incidents (for example, rainbow-painted fingernails) the teams received stern warnings.
The Sochi boycott that I demanded was a boycott by world leaders, by celebrities and sponsors, by CEOs and fans. It was a revolting spectacle for any head of state to come to Sochi and to sit next to Putin in his stately pleasure dome, pretending it was a world apart from the police state he created. As Stephen Fry’s letter pointed out, the world’s embrace of the 1936 Berlin Games gave Adolf Hitler a huge boost of confidence. It is politically incorrect to speak of today, but the entire French Olympic team raised their arms in a stiff salute as they passed by the Führer during the 1936 opening ceremony. Debating as some do whether or not it was a Nazi salute or the similar Olympic salute is definitely beside the point. Hitler and the Germans were delighted by the show of deference. (Many teams, including the British and American, refused to salute.) Putin sought similar adulation and validation in Sochi.
By 1936, Hitler’s government had already spent years persecuting Germany’s Jews. The Nazis also attacked homosexuals, the handicapped, gypsies, and political opponents, a model of oppressing the most vulnerable that Putin is following by going after immigrants, gays, and the opposition. It’s a tragedy that the free world always refuses to learn from past mistakes where dictators and would-be dictators are concerned.
The autocrats, in contrast, are eager students of their predecessors. They make careful study of how to gradually remove rights without allowing rebellion, how to crush dissent and hold sham elections while keeping favorable travel and trade status in the West, and how to talk peace while waging war. The motives of dictators vary, it is true—communism, fascism, conquest, larceny—but the drive for total control never changes and their methods are painfully repetitive. In contrast, the idea that free nations have a responsibility to defend innocents from murder and oppression is repeatedly allowed to approach extinction. We only revive it when the latest crisis has already occurred.
Ukraine is the latest victim of this dynamic. Sochi was a Potemkin village and it turned out that the Sochi Games were themselves used as a smokescreen for bigger things. When the EU declined to offer improved terms to enhance Ukraine’s integration into Europe in 2013, Putin was quick to step in with his usual mix of threats and bribes, a language his flunky Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych spoke fluently. Here is one place where democracy has trouble competing with a wealthy dictatorship. Europe offers committees and vague timelines and in exchange requires transparency and painful reforms. Putin offers hard cash and all he wants is your freedom and your soul.
Unfortunately for Putin and Yanukovych, the Ukrainian people had something to say about this betrayal. When Yanukovych declared that he would suspend preparation to sign Ukraine’s EU Association Agreement, Ukrainians came in huge numbers to Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kyiv’s central Independence Square, to protest Yanukovych’s attempt to move Ukraine away from Europe and into cold Putin’s embrace. “Euromaidan” was born on November 21, 2013, with a few thousand protesters that surged into the tens and even hundreds of thousands over the next few days. The protesters quickly moved from demanding European integration to demanding Yanukovych’s resignation. Ukraine was not Russia, they were saying, and they would fight to keep it that way. Tragically, they would have to fight, and die.
In the middle of the night on November 30, Ukrainian special police forces, Berkut, attacked the Kyiv protesters and drove them from the square, injuring dozens. Amazingly, the protest not only regrouped, but was reinforced to greater numbers in response to the attacks. In the first week of December, the protesters organized and set up barricades and a camp in Maidan Nezalezhnosti. They occupied the Kyiv city council building and demanded that Yanukovych’s government resign. Yanukovych went to Sochi on December 6 for an unscheduled meeting with Putin to receive instructions. They did not sign anything to enter Ukraine into Putin’s “Soviet Union–lite” customs union trade bloc as feared, but the Ukrainian prime minister announced there would be a major agreement signed on December 17.
December 8 saw the largest protests yet, upward of half a million people in Kyiv according to most media reports. Negotiations by the Yanukovych government went on with visiting EU groups, former Ukrainian presidents, and popular leaders like Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxing champion and member of parliament. (His younger brother Wladimir is the current champion. They are both enthusiastic chess players.) There were more clashes between the police and protesters on the eleventh but the protesters proved resilient despite the freezing conditions and the government was still wary of using overwhelming force with the world watching. Yanukovych met with Catherine Ashton of the EU and US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, whose support for the protests is still used by Russian propaganda to “prove” the entire Euromaidan was a coup plot run by the CIA.
Negotiations continued through December while Maidan became a strange sort of pro-freedom tourist destination, with visiting politicians from all over the world coming to speak to the crowds. Protesters, journalists, and opposition leaders were victimized in raids and attacks by shadowy forces. Incredibly, while it all seemed to be rushing by at the time, with news and surprises coming nearly every day, the standoff continued well into January. Putin kept dangling carrots that Yanukovych was too terrified to reach for. Putin would rather have seen the protesters violently put down than peacefully accommodated, of course. The Kremlin had hoped the Orange Revolution virus had been isolated and contained along Russia’s borders and promised Ukraine $15 billion to aid in its quarantine. Yanukovych’s panicky turnarounds showed that although he wanted to live like Putin, he did not want to die like Gaddafi.
More violence erupted soon after new anti-protest laws were passed on January 16, including several deaths. Several activists who had gone to the hospital for treatment were abducted and one was later found murdered. Yanukovych attempted to bring the opposition leaders inside his government in an attempt to quell the protests, offering positions to Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Klitschko. The offer was declined.
Throughout Euromaidan, Russian officials made increasingly hysterical accusations about the role of “foreign agents” in the protests. Despite having no evidence, the Kremlin repeatedly accused the Ukrainian citizens of being trained and armed by America and of plotting a violent coup. This line was reminiscent of the way the Soviet Union treated dissidents. If you were against them it could only be because you were a foreign spy, or crazy. The Kremlin could not afford to admit that Ukrainians, the people closest to Russians, were fighting for their freedom. As with Georgia, it was a bad example that could give Russians dangerous ideas.
Despite the resignation of the entire Ukrainian cabinet on January 28, and the Yanukovych government’s sudden willingness to make minor concessions to the courageous protestors, tension continued to build in the streets. A Kremlin delegation arrived to discuss things with Yanukovych in private. It was as if the government was waiting for something. The relative calm ended on February 18 as violence erupted over the next several days. Russian-trained snipers from the Ukrainian special forces fired into the crowds. At least eighty people were killed (including a dozen police) and more than a thousand were seriously injured. But again the protesters refused to disappear and this time it was clear they would settle for nothing less than Yanukovych’s exit. Euromaidan went from protest to revolution.
Instead of resigning or waiting to be impeached, Yanukovych fled to the safety of his patrons in Russia before he could be brought to justice over the epic scale of his corruption. Photos of his gold-plated palace spread like wildfire on the Internet as the opposition established a new government and scheduled new elections for May.
It is no coincidence that the Ukrainian security forces stormed the Kyiv opposition camps of Maidan during the Sochi Games, which ran February 7–23. Russia invaded Georgia during the Beijing Olympics in 2008, remember. Such spectacles have often provided useful distractions and much of the media that had been in Kyiv had moved to Sochi by the time the worst violence erupted.
Sochi provided a distraction at home for Putin as well. Opposition activist Sergei Udaltsov’s trial was delayed until February 18; he faced ten years in prison for “organizing mass riots,” which is Kremlin-speak for walking down the street at the front of a protest march—the march that was peaceful until violently crushed by police. The Bolotnaya Square case produced eight guilty verdicts on February 21, again under the welcome distraction of the Olympic Games.
The news showed plenty of photos of a smiling Vladimir Putin posing and raising glasses with deferential politicians, officials, and athletes; exactly the coverage he hoped for while his injustice system created more Russian political prisoners. Putin learned from history that people tire of bad news, tire of hearing sad stories of repression and death. Propaganda works best of all when it is easier to hear lies than to hear the truth, but it cannot change the truth.
As I had feared would happen, Olympics broadcaster NBC and the IOC followed Putin’s script and portrayed Sochi as a step toward liberalization in Russia instead of the reverse. Putin used the Games as a distraction from show trials and the most virulent anti-American and anti-Semitic campaigns in decades. How could these stories compete with figure skaters and hockey players? But the Ukrainian people did not play their appointed roles and they fought for their freedom and their lives. Their courage deserves every accolade. The protesters of Euromaidan remind us that no matter how much respect a dictator is paid by foreign leaders during his rule, the story ends the same way: disgrace in the eyes of his own people.
The International Olympic Committee was an eager partner in all of it and of course has a long and dark history of its own. For example, after the triumph of Berlin the next Games were planned for the fascist capitals of Tokyo in 1940 and Rome in 1944. IOC president Thomas Bach’s strained protests about how foreign leaders protesting Sochi were “inserting politics into sport” ignored the fact that selling a huge platform for propaganda and corruption to a dictatorship is also “playing politics.” By Bach’s dubious rationale, the IOC would happily award the Games to North Korea as long as the venues were adequate and the fees were paid promptly.
I knew Putin was not standing by idly while his flunky Yanukovych abandoned Ukraine. I warned in an article in the French paper Le Monde on February 24 that “if Putin cannot have all of Ukraine under his fist, he would settle for partition. Already, guided by the Kremlin, Russian-leaning regions of Ukraine like Crimea are talking of ‘independence,’ which, in the finest Orwellian tradition, would mean exactly the opposite, the loss of freedom as a piece of Putin’s neo-USSR.”
When Assad and Putin danced a waltz across Obama’s red line in Syria in 2013, I warned that dictators and would-be dictators from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang were watching closely. Would the West stand up to aggression against a sovereign state to preserve “regional influence”? Did the Obama administration in particular have the courage of its convictions when it came to keeping promises when they were challenged? While there were other factors, I’m convinced that Syria gave Putin added confidence to find out. Putin had returned Russia to a police state and Ukraine, referred to by Putin as “Little Russia,” was next on his list. This seemed apparent to me, especially considering the many parallels with the Berlin Games of 1936.
Putin wanted the Sochi Olympiad to be his Peter the Great moment, his beloved Soviet summer resort town turned into an international jewel the way St. Petersburg was built into an imperial capital practically from scratch. Putin also hoped to drum up some patriotic pride with a big circus to serve with thick Russian black bread. This is the sort of delusion that sets in when a despot confuses himself with the state after being too long in power. Absent the feedback mechanisms of a free media and real elections, he begins to believe his glory is the country’s glory, that what makes him happy also makes the people happy.
There is a distinction here between Sochi 2014 and the Summer Games in Moscow in 1980 and Beijing in 2008. In those earlier cases, the authoritarian propaganda machine was in the service of promoting the achievements of a country and a system. They were dedicated to the greater glory of Communism, the totalitarian state, the superiority of the system and the athletes it produced. Nobody remembers who presided over the 2008 Games in Beijing and only a few might recall Brezhnev in Moscow. Meanwhile, the chairman of the Russian Olympic Committee never appeared on TV or anywhere else, nor did the director of the Sochi Games. No, the Sochi spectacle was clearly about the ambitions and hubris of one ubiquitous man, something it has in common with the Summer Games held in Berlin in 1936.
I will detour for a moment because this is where I often used to see interviewers and pundits roll their eyes. The phrase “But Putin is no Hitler!” formed on their lips before I’d finished saying the word “Berlin.” It is a fascinating and dangerous development in historical ignorance that nearly any mention of Hitler or the Nazis is now ritually scoffed at, from professional journalists to anonymous tweets. It’s as if the slow and public evolution of a German populist politician into history’s most infamous monster is beyond rational contemplation.
I’m very aware of the dangers of comparing anything bad to the Nazis or Hitler, or everything repressive to fascism, or every act of appeasement to Munich. Overuse leads to trivialization and the loss of meaning, which is also why “genocide” and “Holocaust” must be reserved for very specific things instead of used casually or for shock value. This is the very heart of “Never again” and it must not be forgotten. This is why President Obama’s seven-year streak of breaking his 2008 campaign promise to recognize the Armenian genocide matters. How can we fight against the many evils present in our world today if we do not have the courage to face an evil whose ghosts are a century old? So we must be honest and we must be brave enough to call evil by its name, especially the mother of all twentieth-century genocides.
And so it is not at all lightly that I compare a modern one-man dictatorship spreading fascist propaganda to a previous one when it annexes a chunk of a European neighbor on exactly the same pretext of “protecting our blood brothers.” It is not out of ignorance or a desire to shock that I compare the cowardice and conciliation displayed today by the leaders of the free world toward Putin with the desperate, futile, and ultimately ruinous appeasement policies of the 1930s toward Hitler. These are coherent and dangerous precedents, not trivial comparisons of two diminutive autocrats each with a penchant for profanity.
Of course the evil of the Nazis defies rational comparison. Of course no one can rival the murderous fiend Hitler became in the 1940s, or the horrors he produced. Of course no one assumes a new world war or an attempt to emulate the Holocaust. But summarily discarding the lessons of Hitler’s political rise, how he wielded power, and how he was disregarded and abetted for so long is foolish and dangerous. And as I said in the introduction, back in 1936 even Hitler was no Hitler. He was already viewed with suspicion by many inside and outside Germany, yes, but he stood beaming in that Berlin Olympic stadium and received accolades from world leaders and stiff-armed salutes from the world’s athletes. There is no doubt that this triumph on the world stage emboldened the Nazis and strengthened their ambitions.
Intentionally or not, the Putin regime followed the Berlin 1936 playbook quite closely for Sochi. There were the same token concessions in response to international outcries over bigoted laws. A few prominent political prisoners were released right before the journalists arrived. Even the tone of the propaganda had a very familiar ring, as brilliantly illustrated by the writer and journalist Viktor Shenderovich. He quoted a statement by Putin loyalist politician Vladimir Yakunin accusing the Western media of anti-Russian hysteria and hostility and condemning these foreign critics for attempting to disrupt the Olympics. Shenderovich then revealed that half of the statement was actually by Karl Ritter von Halt, the organizer of the Berlin Games, only substituting “Russia” for “Germany” throughout. The transition was seamless.
At the end of February 2014, for the second time in six years, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops across an internationally recognized border to occupy territory. This fact must be stated plainly before any discussion of motives or consequences. Russian troops took Ukrainian Crimea by force, and also assisted with the evacuation there of Viktor Yanukovych. This act made Putin a member of an exclusive club, along with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milošević, as one of the very few leaders to invade a neighboring nation in the nuclear age. A few weeks later Putin outdid Milošević by formally annexing Crimea, as Hussein did with Kuwait.
Such raw expansionist aggression had been out of fashion since the time of Adolf Hitler, who eventually failed, and Joseph Stalin, who succeeded. Stalin’s Red Army had its share of battle-field glory, but his real triumph came at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, three months before the end of the war in Europe. There Stalin bullied a feeble Franklin Roosevelt and a powerless Winston Churchill, redrawing the Polish borders and promising elections in Poland when he knew that the Communist government the Soviets were installing was there to stay.
Although it is a poignant coincidence, there is more to this look back to World War II than the fact that Yalta is located in Crimea. Putin’s tactics are easily, and accurately, compared to those of the Austrian Anschluss and the Nazi occupation and annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938. There was the same rhetoric about protecting a threatened population, the same propaganda filled with lies, justifications, and accusations. Putin also followed the Stalin model on Poland in Yalta: first invade, then negotiate.
Crimea was forced to hold a sham referendum over joining Russia a few weeks later, a vote that took place on the Kremlin’s preferred terms, at the point of a gun and with the result never in doubt. That Crimeans had already voted in the past to stay part of Ukraine did not come up.
Putin’s move in Crimea came just hours after then–Ukrainian president Yanukovych scrambled up his puppet strings from Kyiv to his master’s hand in Russia. He left behind thousands of papers and a few palaces, evidence of the vast scale of his personal and political corruption. His ejection, bought in blood by the courageous people of Ukraine, made Putin look weak. Like any schoolyard bully or crime boss, Putin immediately found a way to look and feel tough again. The historically pivotal Crimean peninsula, with its large Russia-leaning population and geographic vulnerability (and a Russian naval base), was a natural target.
As I have said for years, it is a waste of time to attempt to discern deep strategy in Mr. Putin’s actions. There are no complex national interests in his calculations. There are only personal interests, the interests of those close to him who keep him in power, and how best to consolidate that power. Without real elections or a free media, the only way a dictator can communicate with his subjects is through propaganda and the only way he can validate his power is with regular shows of force.
Inside Russia, that force is brought forth against dissidents and civil rights. Abroad, force in the form of military action, trade sanctions, or economic extortion is applied wherever Putin thinks he can get away with it. So far, that has been quite often and so far, Putin has been right.
Despite the predictions of many pundits, politicians, and so-called experts, Putin formally annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea. Perhaps Putin was not impressed by these critics’ sound reasoning and elegant discourse on how his invasion and annexation were against Russian national interests. The main problem with what we can call the “Putin would never” arguments in the West is that they assume Putin and his ruling elite care about Russian national interests. They do not, except in the few areas where they overlap with their own goal of looting as much cash and treasure from the country as possible. It is long past time to stop listening to Harvard professors and think-tank experts lecture us about what Putin would never do and high time to respond to what he is actually doing.
The next obstacle to stopping Putin is the self-imposed paralysis of the leaders of Europe and the G7. The hard truth is that the only sanctions, or actions of any kind, that will affect Putin’s conduct are those that directly or indirectly target his hold on power in Russia. It’s all Putin cares about because he knows what happens to people like him when they lose that grip. This is why Secretary of State John Kerry’s comment to his counterpart Sergei Lavrov after Crimea was so precisely wrong. “We hope President Putin will recognize that none of what we’re saying is meant as a threat,” Kerry said. “It’s not meant in a personal way.” With one feeble remark, Kerry took the only things Putin cares about, threats and personal power, off the table.
Obama repeated this mistake two days later when he announced America would not send troops to defend Ukraine. Nobody was asking for troops anyway, and Obama likely thought he was defusing tensions. But where Obama sees a gesture of peaceful intent, Putin simply sees more weakness. Dropping your weapons to calm a hostage situation might work on a scared kid but it doesn’t work against someone like Putin. In Putin’s eyes, Obama is his only real opponent in the world and his opponent had just voluntarily surrendered one of his greatest advantages: America’s overwhelming military strength. On Iran, on Syria, and then again in Ukraine, Obama outsourced his foreign policy to Putin and, by so doing, he crippled the power of the office he holds in ways that will outlast his White House tenure for years.
On March 28, Putin called Obama to discuss Ukraine, although what was said is different from what was heard. Analyzing the discrepancies between the White House and Kremlin press releases of these calls has become a cottage industry and usually you would never guess that the reports are about the same conversation. The White House report mentioned the need for “constitutional reform and democratic elections” in Ukraine and Russia pulling back its troops from Eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin summary referred to the “rampant extremists” in Kyiv and added the separatist Moldovan region of Transnistria to the conversation in a blatant threat to up the ante once again.
I was more interested in a word that wasn’t mentioned in either summary: “Crimea.” Evidently this chunk of sovereign Ukrainian territory, invaded and annexed by Putin just weeks earlier, had already ceased to be part of the conversation. Just a day earlier, the UN General Assembly had done what the Security Council could not do due to Russia’s veto there. The General Assembly resolution in defense of the territorial integrity of Ukraine received a hundred votes and even intense Russian pressure produced only ten allies, a predictable rogue’s gallery that included Cuba, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Syria, and North Korea. And yet Obama suddenly appeared ready to let Putin shift the frame of the negotiations to whether or not Russia would conquer more of Ukraine.
A month previous, Western pundits had been full of more “Putin would never” predictions, and many warned not to “corner” Putin but to instead offer him a “face-saving retreat” from Crimea. Putin was not interested in any retreat at all and he reversed the tactic against Obama and the West, offering them a face-saving retreat with Eastern Ukraine as the new line in the sand. Over a year later, in the summer of 2015, the fighting there still rages despite several pathetic “cease-fire” agreements that also existed only for Western leaders to save face.
Negotiating with another country’s territory as collateral has a long history. The most obvious example is from 1938, when Hitler graciously offered not to take all of Czechoslovakia in exchange for getting the Sudetenland without any complaints from Britain and France. North Korea and Iran also like to have one-on-one talks with the United States, a way of saying nobody else matters. But Ukraine is not USA versus Russia; it’s the civilized world versus a dictator, and the United Nations vote supported that assessment ten to one.
The mandate for continued pressure on Putin is clear, if only the West has the courage to maintain it and increase it. Otherwise, just as Czechoslovakia was absent from the “great power” negotiations in 1938, Ukraine’s fledgling government will be relegated to the role of a spectator, a patient under local anesthetic watching helplessly as the surgeons slice away. For the United States to participate in talks is well and good, especially as a signatory of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine’s territory. But Ukrainian representatives should be present at every step and the people of Ukraine must be kept informed throughout before other nations get too far along in deciding what is in Ukraine’s best interests.
Putin once again refuted the predictions of his defenders in the West and continued his invasion of Eastern Ukraine. A few months later, as summer approached, thousands of Ukrainians, including many civilians, were dead and hundreds of thousands had been forced to flee. The Ukrainian military was severely overmatched by the “rebel” forces, not that there had ever been a rebel or separatist movement in Eastern Ukraine worth mentioning before Putin discovered a huge and very well-equipped army of them. Europe and the United States refused to provide weapons to Ukraine, limiting themselves to humanitarian assistance and nonlethal aid.
Actions directed at Putin were also shockingly weak despite the clear presence of Russian forces and Russian arms flooding into Ukraine. It’s one thing for academics and pundits to calmly sympathize with Putin and his “vital interests” and his “sphere of influence,” as if 50 million Ukrainians should have no say in the matter. It’s quite another thing for Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Angela Merkel to fret about the “instability” and “high costs” caused by sanctions against Russia, as if that could be worse than the instability caused by the partial annexation of a European country by a nuclear dictatorship, carried out with impunity.
This fecklessness was sad and expected, but I thought it might finally come to an end on July 17 when Malaysia Airlines flight 17 (MH17) was blown out of the sky over Eastern Ukraine by a surface-to-air missile, killing all 298 people aboard. The local separatist leadership immediately boasted about shooting down what they had thought was another Ukrainian military plane, only recanting their statements and deleting their posts when it was revealed to have been a civilian aircraft.
Of course the shock and horror would turn to rage and shame among the leaders of the free world that the war in Ukraine had been allowed to fester. Of course Putin would realize he’d overplayed his hand and attempt to preempt the backlash by withdrawing his forces and his support for Ukrainian separatist terrorists. Of course the fact that two-thirds of the passengers were European (193 of them Dutch) would lead to massive Western protests and stiff penalties against Russia.
Of course none of that happened.
I said at the time that MH17 wouldn’t change Putin’s calculations in any way, but I hoped it would provoke a Western response that would. Somehow I managed to underestimate the cowardice of the Western world once again. The rhetoric changed a little, and briefly, but little else. An investigation was announced, although it would take a long time to get started since the separatist forces would not allow the wreckage and bodies to be collected until they had looted them. Where was the rage? Nobody believed the separatists’ excuses or Russian propaganda about anything other than a Russian missile. Was it because Ukraine was far away, was poor and unimportant, and had been turned into a war zone? Had Putin’s forces shot down that same aircraft over Amsterdam or Kuala Lumpur would it have made a difference? I’m not sure I want to know the answer.
So who was to blame? This is not a simple question even if you know the answer. That is, of course the person who pushed the button that launched the missile is to blame; that is the easy part. Shall we just arrest him and try him for murder? Responsibility is a greater concept than that. You have the commander who gave the order to push the button. Then the person who provided the missiles to the separatists. Then there are the officials who opened the border to allow military weaponry to cross into Ukraine and the ministers and generals in Moscow who gave those orders. Then we come to the desk where all power resides in Russia, the desk of the man those ministers and generals obey very carefully: the desk of Vladimir Putin.
Blaming Putin for these 298 deaths is as correct and as pointless as blaming the man who pressed the button that launched the missile. Everyone had known for months that Russia arms and supports the separatists in Ukraine. Everyone had known for years that a mouse does not squeak in the Russian government without first getting Putin’s permission. So, yes, Putin is responsible for those 298 deaths, more than anyone else.
But blaming Putin for invading Ukraine—for annexing Crimea, for giving advanced surface-to-air missiles to separatists—is like blaming that proverbial scorpion for stinging the frog. It is expected. It is his nature. Instead of worrying about how to change the scorpion’s nature or, even worse, how best to appease it, we must focus on how the civilized world can contain the dangerous creature before more innocents die.
Therefore let us cast our net of responsibility where it may do some good. We turn to the leaders of the free world who did nothing to bolster the Ukrainian border even after Russia annexed Crimea and made its ambitions to destabilize Eastern Ukraine very clear. Is the West to blame? Did they push the button? No. They pretended that Ukraine would not affect them. They hoped that they could safely ignore Ukraine instead of defending the territorial integrity of a European nation under attack. They were paralyzed by fear and internal squabbles. They resisted strong sanctions on Russia because they were worried about the impact on their own economies. They protected jobs but lost lives.
Would this tragedy have happened had tough sanctions against Russia been put into effect the moment Putin moved on Crimea? Would it have happened had NATO made it clear from the start that they would defend the sovereignty of Ukraine with weapons and advisors on the ground? We will never know. Taking action requires courage and there can be high costs in achieving the goal. But as we now see in horror there are also high costs for inaction, and the goal still has not been achieved.
The argument that the only alternative to capitulation to Putin is World War III is for the simple-minded. There were, and always are, a range of responses. Financial and travel restrictions against Putin’s cronies and their families and harsh sanctions against key Russian economic sectors may also do some damage to European economies. Until MH17, Europe could argue about how much money their principles were worth. After MH17 they had to argue about how much money 298 lives were worth.
As Russian troops and armored columns advance in Eastern Ukraine the Ukrainian government begs for aid from the free world. That’s the same free world Ukrainians hoped would receive them and protect them as one of its own after the protesters of Maidan grasped their victory paid in blood. The leaders of the free world, meanwhile, are still struggling to find the right terminology to free themselves from the moral responsibility to provide that protection. Putin’s invasion of a sovereign European nation is an “incursion,” much like Crimea—remember Crimea?—was an “uncontested arrival” instead of Anschluss. A civilian airliner was blown out of the sky by Russian-backed and Russian-armed (and likely Russian, period) forces in Eastern Ukraine and, despite the 298 victims, the outrage quickly dissipated into polite discussions about whether it should be investigated as a crime, a war crime, or neither.
This vocabulary of cowardice emanating from Berlin and Washington is as disgraceful as the “black is white” propaganda produced by Putin’s regime, and even more dangerous. Moscow’s smokescreens are hardly necessary in the face of so much willful blindness. Putin’s lies are obvious and expected. European leaders and the White House are even more eager than the Kremlin to pretend this conflict is local and so requires nothing more than vague promises from a very safe distance. As George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay on language, right before starting work on his novel 1984 (surely not a coincidence), “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” The Western rhetoric of appeasement creates a self-reinforcing loop of mental and moral corruption. Speaking the truth now would mean confessing to many months of lies, just as it took years—and this war—for Western leaders to finally admit Putin didn’t belong in the G7.
New Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko met with President Obama in Washington in September 2014, but Obama’s subsequent statement showed no sign he was willing to acknowledge reality. Generic wishes about “mobilizing the international community” were bad enough when it all started. Hearing them repeated as Ukrainian towns fell to Russian troops is a parody. I suggested at the time that Poroshenko should have worn a T-shirt saying “It’s a War, Stupid” to the meeting. As Russian tanks and artillery push back the overmatched Ukrainian forces, Obama’s repeated insistence that there is no military solution in Ukraine sounds increasingly delusional. There is no time to teach a drowning man to swim.
The United States, Canada, and even Europe have responded to Putin’s aggression, it is true, but always a few moves behind, always after the deterrent potential of each action had passed. Strong sanctions and a clear demonstration of support for Ukrainian territorial integrity as I recommended at the time would have had real impact when Putin moved on Crimea in February and March. A sign that there would be real consequences would have split his elites as they pondered the loss of their coveted assets on both sides of the Atlantic.
Then in April and May, the supply of defensive military weaponry would have forestalled the invasion currently under way, or at least raised its price considerably and thereby made the Russian public a factor in the Kremlin’s decision-making process much earlier. Those like me who called for such aid at the time were called warmongers, and policy makers again sought dialogue with Putin. And yet war arrived regardless, as it always does in the face of weakness.
As one of the pioneers of the analogy and the ominous parallels, I feel the irony in how it quickly went from scandal to cliché to compare Putin to Hitler in the media, for better and for worse. Certainly Putin’s arrogance and language remind us more and more of Hitler, as do the rewards he’s reaped from them. For this he can thank the overabundance of Chamberlains in the halls of power today—and there is no Churchill in sight. War comes from weakness, not strength.
As long as it is easy, as long as Putin collects his triumphs without resistance, he gains more support. He took Crimea with barely a shot fired. He flooded Eastern Ukraine with agents and weaponry while Europe dithered. The oligarchs who might have pressured Putin at the start of his Ukrainian adventure are now war financiers with no graceful exit. So many bridges have been burned that the Kremlin’s pressure points now are harder to reach.
The humiliating failure of the two peace agreements signed in Minsk proved that leaders of the free world simply refuse to admit that there is no dealing with Putin the way they deal with one another. There is no mutually beneficial business as usual. He exploits and abuses every opening and feels no obligation to operate by the rule of law or human rights inside or outside of Russia. Putin is a lost cause and Russia will also be a lost cause until he is gone. It was an error from the start to treat Putin like any other leader, but now there are no more excuses.
Putin won’t back down or be kicked out of Ukraine until credible threats to his power create a split among his elites and advisors. Right now they have no incentive to bet against him. Putin protects them and their assets while the free world they so enjoy living in has made no moves that would finally force them to choose between their riches and Putin. Changing that calculus is the only nonmilitary way to protect Ukraine—and wherever Putin goes next to find new enemies to feed into the propaganda machine that keeps him in power at home.
Obama and Europe’s leaders still want to play by the rules even after Putin ripped up the rule book and threw the shreds in their faces. Sanctioning a few of Putin’s political hacks is a joke and the Kremlin’s elites are right to laugh. To take a phrase from the aptly titled All the President’s Men, “Follow the money!” Sanction the elites who support Putin, go after all the family members they use to hide their assets abroad, and scrutinize their companies. Putin’s oligarchs openly support an administration that directly sponsors terrorists in Ukraine; surely there are ways to go after them and their assets. If existing laws are inadequate to deal with billionaire thugs who enable a dangerous regime, write new ones. And do it quickly.
The Russian military commanders, the ones in the field, are not fools. They are aware that NATO is watching and could blow them to bits in a moment. They rely on Putin’s aura of invincibility, which grows every day the West refuses to provide Ukraine with military support. Those commanders must be made to understand that they are facing an overwhelming force, that their lives are in grave danger, that they can and will be captured and prosecuted. To make this a credible threat requires immediate military aid, if not yet the “boots on the ground” everyone but Putin is so keen to avoid. If NATO nations continue to refuse to send lethal aid to Ukraine it will be yet another green light to Putin.
Once again, Putin lies about small things while carrying out his larger threats and goals. He denied there were ever Russian troops in Crimea for a year and then in a Russian documentary aired on March 16, 2015, proudly described deploying thousands of Russian special forces to the Ukrainian peninsula. Of course no one could pretend to be shocked since it had been known practically from the beginning, thanks to satellite photography combined with reporters, bloggers, and locals on social media posting photos of Russian troops and weapons. It should teach us a lesson about what sort of human being he is. If he has a goal, any lies, crimes, or violence needed to achieve that goal are perfectly acceptable and should be expected. After all, he told you what he was going to do. You don’t get to complain about how he does it. This is also how Putin has run Russia for fifteen years.
The same circumstances are unfolding with the far larger Russian force in Eastern Ukraine today, which is only growing despite the latest “Minsk II” cease-fire charade. Between “ceasefires” the Russia-backed forces took hundreds of square kilometers more of Ukrainian territory and created hundreds of new casualties. The death toll is now well over six thousand. In a few more months Putin will probably admit to that, too, and perhaps pin medals on the missile crew that shot down MH17. Why not? He enjoys flaunting his lies in the faces of his victims and the leaders of the free world who refuse to protect them. In the same documentary, Putin said he’d been ready to put Russia’s nuclear arsenal at the highest level of alert over Crimea. He says things like this because he knows the impact it will have in the West. The people and leaders of the free world that brought down the Soviet empire have forgotten what saber rattling sounds like.
Putin is no master strategist. He’s an aggressive poker player facing weak opposition from a Western world that has become so risk averse that it would rather fold than call any bluff, no matter how good its cards are. In the end, Putin is a Russian problem, of course, and Russians must deal with how to remove him. He and his repressive regime, however, are supported directly and indirectly by the free world due to this one-way engagement policy. We must recall the painful memories about the fatal dangers of appeasing a dictator, of disunity in the face of aggression, and of greedily grabbing at an ephemeral peace while guaranteeing a lasting war.
As always when it comes to stopping dictators, with every delay the price goes up. Western leaders have protested over the potential costs of action in Ukraine at every turn only to be faced with the well-established historical fact that the real costs of inaction are always even higher. Now the only options left are risky and difficult, and yet they must be tried. The best reason for acting to stop Putin today is brutally simple: it will only get harder tomorrow.