For KGB operatives, this was not a time of rejoicing, but rather a lesson about the nature of street movements and the power of rhetoric: democratic rhetoric, antiauthoritarian rhetoric, anti-totalitarian rhetoric. As the world’s television screens blared out the news of the Cold War’s end, Putin and his KGB comrades in the doomed Soviet satellite state were frantically burning all of their files, making calls to Moscow that were never returned, fearing for their lives and their careers. Instead, he was posted to the KGB office in Dresden, East Germany, where he endured the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as a personal tragedy. Putin missed that moment of exhilaration. Kori Schake: Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is backfiring Many felt the real possibility of change, and they thought it could be change for the better. The policy of glasnost-openness-meant that people were speaking the truth for the first time in decades. The later years of that decade were, for many Russians, a moment of optimism and excitement. That story-which has been told several times, by the authors Fiona Hill, Karen Dawisha, and most recently Catherine Belton-begins in the 1980s. Putin and the people around him have been far more profoundly shaped, rather, by their path to power. The Soviet Union was a Russian-speaking empire, and he seems, at times, to dream of re-creating a smaller Russian-speaking empire within the old Soviet Union’s borders.īut the most significant influence on Putin’s worldview has nothing to do with either his KGB training or his desire to rebuild the U.S.S.R. Although he is sometimes incorrectly described as a Russian nationalist, he is in fact an imperial nostalgist. Fake political groupings played a role in the KGB’s domination of Central Europe after World War II sham separatists played a role in the Bolshevik conquest of Ukraine itself in 1918. Indeed, many of his tactics-the use of sham Russian-backed “separatists” to carry out his war in eastern Ukraine, the creation of a puppet government in Crimea-are old KGB tactics, familiar from the Soviet past.
Nor do we need to know that much about the more recent history of Ukraine or its 70 years as a Soviet republic-though it is true that the Soviet ties of the Russian president, most notably his years spent as a KGB officer, matter a great deal. To explain why requires some history, but not the semi-mythological, faux-medieval history Putin has used in the past to declare that Ukraine is not a country, or that its existence is an accident, or that its sense of nationhood is not real. Read our ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion in Ukraine Why would Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, attack a neighboring country that has not provoked him? Why would he risk the blood of his own soldiers? Why would he risk sanctions, and perhaps an economic crisis, as a result? And if he is not really willing to risk these things, then why is he playing this elaborate game? But of all the questions that repeatedly arise about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the one that gets the least satisfactory answers is this one: Why? There are questions about Germany and France: How will they react? There are questions about America, and how it has come to be a central player in a conflict not of its making. There are questions about the Ukrainian military, its weapons, and its soldiers. There are questions about troop numbers, questions about diplomacy.
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