The typical giant with feet of clay. The Soviet Union was a superpower with tens of thousands of atomic bombs, the most powerful ground army in the world, a cumbersome but resourceful economic system, an iron grip on domestic society, vast international ties, and a global ideology that he made it the “sun of the future” for millions or billions of people outside its borders; yet the USSR collapsed in 1991 without a real why, or at least without an easy reason to tell, such as a defeat in war or a traumatic economic crisis.
To tell the truth, as early as 1947, in a famous article signed “X” in the magazine Foreign Affairs, the American diplomat George F. Kennan wrote that “Soviet power is a crust that hides an amorphous mass of human beings among whom no independent organizational structure is tolerated […]. Consequently, if something were to break the unity and efficiency of the party as a political tool, Soviet Russia could in a moment transform itself from one of the strongest into one of the weakest and most miserable national societies ”. And this seems to be the prophetic description of Gorbachev’s failure and the Yeltsin disaster half a century in advance. But it was a prophecy sine die, and in fact the collapse took place, when the hour struck, in the form of a quantum leap, on the scheme of Schrödinger’s cat, the cat destined to survive or condemned to die in completely unpredictable times and ways.
This, at least, if you stop at the surface. If, on the other hand, one tries to investigate the question of the end of the USSR, some persuasive explanations can be conjectured, and indeed the December issue of the magazine Limes contains several compelling analyzes of how and why the Soviet Union met its fate. However, the objective of the monographic issue entitled “CCCP a past that does not pass” (mimicking Ernst Nolte’s Germany) is not primarily historiographical but geopolitical: in these pages we try to understand how much continuity there is between the defunct USSR and the new Russia, and to what extent Putin is the heir of Stalin and of its ambitions, and how to act accordingly.
Opinions diverge. At one extreme there are those who see in Putin not only the contemporary transfiguration of Stalin, but even a new Hitler, according to a rhetorical excess that is nevertheless frequently encountered. On the other side of the spectrum of analyzes, there are those, like Henry Kissinger, who warn that “to understand Putin one must read Dostoevsky, not the My fight. Putin is aware that Russia today is much weaker than it used to be […]. It lost 300 years of imperial history with the collapse of the Soviet Union and is now strategically threatened along all its borders ”.
Nobody sees Putin as a nice guy worthy of infinite understanding or pampering. There is no doubt that he is a bit nostalgic for the USSR, given that in 2005 he defined the Soviet collapse as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”. Furthermore, it is known that the most dangerous aggressive impulses can derive precisely from an anxious self-perception of weakness. However, this raises the question of whether the policy of tough confrontation, economic sanctions and 21st century “containment” on the Western side is the most useful and effective recipe.
To give just one example, one of the analysts who write about this issue of Limes, Jacob L. Shapiro, stigmatizes that “America behaves with Russians and Chinese alike, eventually uniting them. In the long run, their alignment cannot last, but in the meantime they distract America on several fronts. We need agreements with Moscow on Ukraine and with Beijing on Taiwan ”. It would not be a good result to artificially cement a long-term complicity (we cannot speak of a true alliance) between the Russians and the Chinese. Their interests actually diverge, but Russia, like China, is very capable of establishing cynical relations of interest with countries with which it has nothing in common, as evidenced for example by the Russian-Turkish treaty of 1921, a centennial success.
Let’s get to the concrete: on what basis can (hypothetically) be found a Western compromise with Russia on Ukraine? What Moscow is asking for is a guarantee that Kiev will never join the Atlantic Alliance. Such a guarantee is judged by many in the West as inadmissible. Instead, a few years ago to a German journalist who objected to him “if Ukraine asks to join NATO we certainly cannot say no”, Kissinger brutally retorted “and why not?”. Elsewhere, Kissinger pressed: “There are those who say that we must force Russia to restore international legality in Ukraine through sanctions and isolation, and that if Russia collapsed because of all this, it would be nothing more than the price he pays for aggression. My minority school of thought is that we would probably win a new Cold War, but a new conflict-ridden post-Tito Yugoslavia extending from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok is not in the American national interest. “
One might wonder if the Russian leaders are a theoretically reliable counterpart for the West in any compromise, concerning Ukraine or otherwise. But precisely the modalities of the end of the USSR can (perhaps) suggest a positive answer: ultimately the Soviet leaders showed themselves responsible in 1991, when they allowed themselves to be deprived of without disordered reactions, without triggering a Nibelungian nuclear war as a reaction-spasm to the decline (so an Adolf Hitler would certainly have done in their place) and without creating “a new post-Tito Yugoslavia devastated by conflicts and extended from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok” and with the unknown factor of tens of thousands of atomic weapons scattered everywhere . The current Russian leaders are the direct heirs of the Soviet leaders of the time, trained at the same school, and seem capable of rationally playing the game of world power as is done with chess rather than wrestling. It is at least a plausible hypothesis.
Yet it is difficult for a compromise to really emerge. The background conditions do not seem to be in place, and the fault could lie with the Russians, but also with the Americans; on Limes John P. Willerton notes that “America hates Russia more today than it hated the Soviet Union at the time. Compared to the Cold War, hostility has spread among the population and is now directed not only at the rival government, but also at its people. So much animosity will affect Washington’s approach to Moscow ”.
Luigi Grassia is the author of the book “Arcana empires. Cold War and Geopolitics: George Kennan from Stalin to Putin “, Mimesis Edizioni, pp. 138, 12 euros. Foreword by Domenico Quirico.
