FREE FOR ALL: Masha Gessen explains the logic behind Vladimir Putin’s imperial war — and the limits of his power
FREE FOR ALL: Masha Gessen explains the logic behind Vladimir Putin’s imperial war — and the limits of his power
What Russia's descent into totalitarianism and Putin's disastrous war on the West means for the world
The killing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny was the most visible salvo in Vladimir Putin’s latest round of warfare on the democratic world. The Ukrainian city of Avdiivka was bombarded to near erasure, defector Maksim Kuzminov was murdered in Spain, dual American citizen Ksenia Pavlovna Karelina was arrested, and Russia may be verging on becoming the first nation to violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 by deploying weapons of mass destruction in orbit. We look back at our conversation with journalist Masha Gessen, and what they had to tell us about what the future holds for Putin and Russia, what the eventual end of his reign — and his Russia — might look like.
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There are so many analyses in the media about what Putin wants as well as these debates about his rationality or irrationality. Is he going crazy? Is he paranoid? Does he want power in a conventional way that we can understand? Timothy Snyder had this point about Putin caring about things we don't value. What is your fundamental understanding of his motivation?
I don't think he's particularly mysterious. I find all of this speculation really annoying because what is crazy but another term for somebody existing in coordinates that you can't see?
What Putin has been doing for many, many years is building up to a big war. At a certain point, I felt crazy for saying it because the big war kept not starting. But the logic of his rhetoric, the logic of his actions, the logic of totalitarianism in general — all of these things required a big war. Since his Munich speech in 2007, there has been a constant and open insistence on re-establishing Russia as a great power and a refusal to recognize what's referred to as the world order.
There is the constant glorification of what Russians call “the great patriotic war.” The repeated reminders to the world that Russia fought the Second World War and won it for the universe. That message is unambiguous. The message is that because Russia won the war, it has the right to at least share in world dominance. It earned that right by winning World War II. It earned the right to be a superpower. But the saber-rattling that was involved in this unceasing celebration of the victory in World War II was also a message to both self and the world that we can repeat the big war.
The logic of totalitarianism is imperial. It is expansive. You can only fully mobilize a population if you have a big war to mobilize behind. There was a cheap version of that mobilization when Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. Most Russians were elated and gave a level of totalitarian support for the non-military victory. But that effect wore off after a while, and now you have to have a bloody version of the big war.
What do you think is a path out of this current war?
I don't think peace in good faith is possible. The best-case scenario is a long pause in the fighting necessitated by Russia's clear military failure. Even though the only reason for the pause is this failure, and it's not that Putin has achieved his aims, from his point of view, it would be a temporary respite for Russia to regroup and strike again. But if we're lucky, that pause would be somewhat extended, and then maybe he'll die. That's the best-case scenario.
Worst-case scenario, a nuclear strike.
On Ukraine?
Either Ukraine or Poland.
Is that the worst-case scenario but an infinitesimally small possibility in your mind?
It's not at all small. Rule No. 1 is to listen to and believe the autocrat. Putin keeps reminding the world that Russia has nuclear weapons. I'm really terrified by a couple of interviews given recently by Dmitry Peskov, Putin's press secretary, and Sergey Karaganov, an influential foreign policy expert in Kremlin-adjacent circles.
Peskov was asked whether Putin will rule out nuclear weapons, and he said no. That's a matter of policy. Clearly, that is a decision that's been made. That’s on the table. If it’s on the table, as Chekhov teaches us, it is going to strike sooner or later. Of course, there is still the question of whether he will die sooner than he pushes the nuclear button.
In the Karaganov interview, he goes on about how the NATO treaty is basically fiction and how Article Five doesn't obligate NATO countries to come to the defense of other members. This is a very important idea in both Russian and Ukrainian foreign policy circles for different reasons. Nothing happens automatically in NATO. If it's a war of nerves, NATO is likely to lose because of its lethargic, complicated structure.
Russia is essentially saying, What are you going to do if we fire a tactical nuclear weapon at a military airport in Poland? This is something that they see themselves justified in potentially doing because those military airports are being used to supply military equipment to Ukraine. Considering there's no automatic response, do you want to be drawn into a shooting war with Russia?
We keep hearing on this side of the Atlantic that we don't want to be drawn into a shooting war with Russia. It's being heard loud and clear there, too, and it's being interpreted as basically shifting the goalpost further and further away from the Russian border.
For you and your Russian friends and colleagues of your generation, there have been a lot of difficult things over the last many years. Why was it this moment, as much as or more than any other, that caused many young and middle-aged people to give up on any kind of future in Russia?
That's a great question. The answer is that this is really unthinkable. Most of what concerned my friends and acquaintances after Russia annexed Crimea was what happened to Russians domestically, the surreal mental and political mobilization in the sense that good people became really marginalized. Any autocratic regime renders people provincial and mostly focused on themselves.
The thing is, you can't keep focusing on yourself and your terrible losses when your country is bombing Kyiv. Once you can no longer focus on how horrible things are for you, you have to escape. I think it was really what I described in a New Yorker piece for a lot of people. It just felt unbearable to be there – being inside the plane that's bombing places that people recognize, where they have friends, where they had visited many times. This you can't look away from. If you can't run from the images, you can at least run from the country.
Masha Gessen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of several books, including “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.”
